“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent you convinced yourselves that such creative activity was indeed in some respects more work certainly than play. In your own art you worked relatively slowly, measured out your pleasure in a fashion, even thinking sometimes in the past that your talent required (underlined) periods of indecision and difficulty. Often you emphasized impediments. It seemed almost sacrilegious to think that the production of excellent art could involve fun—or worse, an active sense of irresponsibility, a joyful sense of ease, so that if a painting came too quickly you could not trust it.

(9:20.) In the world of official thought, work does indeed seem to imply responsibility. It seems to many that left alone people would not want to work at all, and that people’s pleasures would lead them into frivolous behavior. In actuality, of course, people’s pleasure, if it were understood and pursued, would lead to far more fulfilling and productive work, or working lives, since individuals would automatically know how to choose productive activities that brought them pleasure, and that were then pursued for their own sakes.

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.

Animals care for their young out of natural pleasure and love, not out of a sense of responsibility. The word “responsibility” is often used precisely because people have forgotten how to feel natural pleasure with themselves, their activities or relationships.

(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.