“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I guess I’m confused,” Jane said at 8:55. “I feel responsible to get more on responsibility, I guess, where this afternoon I thought I’d like him to finish that chapter in his book and get started on another one. Then you came out and said you’d like more on responsibility, so....” I explained that my idea was only to get more material on what Seth had begun yesterday—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do material on other things too.

(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.

The body itself is designed for pleasure. Value fulfillment seeks out pleasure. The entire idea of free will involves the making of choices between various gradations of pleasurable behavior. Value fulfillment even with the animals insists upon a qualitative enjoyment of life’s existence—one that automatically fosters a loving cooperation with the rest of nature as the individual follows impulses toward various kinds of pleasures. But the word pleasure often has a negative connotation to official morality. (Long pause.) If you follow the pursuit of pleasure in this creative manner, then you will automatically begin to discard faulty concepts of responsibility.

(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.