“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:20 PM Jane called and asked whether she should have a session—she couldn’t make up her mind. I said I wanted more material on responsibility, that I wanted Seth to discuss it so it would help free her. “So I should have the session because it’s my responsibility to do it,” she said. “No,” I answered, “but it would be nice to have it in order to learn that your only responsibility is to get rid of the idea of responsibility. That’s all I care about.”

(Jane has felt somewhat better the last couple of days, and I’ve been hoping that what we’re learning is “responsible” for that improvement. I told her as we waited for the session that I was all for more material on the responsibility question, for I see it as the key to setting her free. I said also that her decision to give up doing publicity, made just recently, might be helping her feel better.

(“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.

Generally speaking, large segments of your official society do not regard the pursuit of art as responsible behavior.

(Long pause.) In an industrialized society, people were trained to fit into assembly line productions. The imagination was itself considered suspect. It was felt that creativity served no responsible end in society. Again, you both pursued your own courses nevertheless. You did so, however, in the light of that psychological climate, so that while you went your own ways you also reacted to the social environment: you tried to show other people that you were indeed responsible—more, that you worked (underlined) not only as hard as others, but often harder (underlined).

Years ago, Ruburt picked up that idea of work, applying it to creativity in his (underlined) own ways. You made it clear to others that while they be free, free on weekends or holidays, you yourselves were still involved with “work” (underlined)—all of this to show that you were responsible persons.

(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.

This artistic sense of responsibility was given a thicker coat by what seemed to be psychic responsibility: it seemed to Ruburt that he should use his abilities primarily to help others, or to help solve the world’s problems, or to cast some light into man’s condition. Certainly the attitude of some correspondents was involved there. Actually, however, it was the simple extension of such a feeling into the psychic realm, where it was further hardened by many religious views.

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.

Ruburt saddled himself with a feeling of responsibility, however. At the same time of course he naturally resented such dictates. They tempered his own inspiration, narrowed his spontaneity. The idea of that kind of responsibility is extremely persuasive, however, in your society. (Long pause.) Because women were somehow regarded as less responsible than males, more easily given to frivolity, Ruburt also tried even harder to insure that he was acting in a responsible way.

It added considerably, however, to the thick coat of responsibility that he placed about his own shoulders. He is still harder on women than he is on men in that regard. In that light then again, to stand somewhat apart from my material, to question it as a matter of principle, became a sign of responsibility. It showed that he was not a frivolous female, fancifully following each stray imaginative trance image.

(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.

(Note that Seth didn’t continue with his material on the mail, which he began in answer to my question on July 26. I also forgot to ask him to. In that last session I meant to add the thought that we may have to dispense with answering much of the mail. I’ll gladly do this if I discover that it is behind any large-sized hassle Jane may be carrying around about public responsibility. The mail would have to go, at least until she’d resolved such an issue. It serves as a constant reminder of what many people regard as her responsibility, and could be more of an impediment or irritant than I had suspected, I told her the other day. People read the books, get something out of them—then want personal help that Jane can’t give in any meaningful, long-term way. She’s been very rigorous in answering the mail for a number of years, and my thought at the moment at least is that it—the mail—might be more of a time bomb than we realized in that respect.