“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.