“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: comments.

Now art itself functions in a different manner. First of all, the artist in whatever medium loves the activity for itself, and everything else is basically (underlined) secondary. You have a love of pleasure, focused into a certain magical kind of creativity. (Long pause.) This love and this pleasure automatically put the individual in harmony with the nature of existence itself, for existence operates in the same manner.

(9:46.) At the same time, he recognized the excellence of our joint creativity. When you overstress the idea of responsibility, pleasure largely goes out the window, so he is now learning to redefine the term, “pleasure,” and to experience it in its many forms. He is learning to identify himself with his pleasures —a highly important point—one that, understood, can release triggers of healing energy and creative impetus.

(Long pause.) Pleasure implies play as well, of course, and art involves a kind of high free play—an extension of it that cannot be tied to personal or to mass need. High play of that nature opens doors of excellence that responsibility alone can never touch, and results in far more valuable help to the world as a natural by-product than any self-determined behavior can, so these are the ideas that we want to stress, both in bodily terms and in psychic and creative ones, and Ruburt is beginning to understand some of that now. The idea of creative play—and in those terms of a certain kind of abandonment—should be encouraged; the kind of abandonment a child feels when playing a game, in which it identifies with pleasurable activity. It therefore joins with its own unconscious processes, and those processes are connected more intimately with the very source of its being.

(I would like to add that I found the session to be excellent as usual, but also found some of the material sad and depressing: It looked like we had a lot of wasted years involved in negative thinking, and that we were now struggling to get out of or rid of. At the moment I couldn’t decide if everyone had such hassles in life, or if Jane and I had managed to create sets of beliefs that were indeed “beauts” and quite unusual. I was afraid our beliefs ruled our lives so completely, were so pervasive, that we’d never get out of their mazes. As I asked Paul O’Neill last month: “How do you be objective about something when you’re inside of it?”)