November 28, 1977

[DELETED SESSION]

[NOVEMBER 28, 1977 9:37 PM MONDAY]

(Jane has been employing to good effect Seth's suggestion about using the red star, as he gave that idea in the last deleted session. Various changes continue to take place throughout her body. For myself, I wanted Seth's comments on the Spanish Framework 2 connections that he detailed last session, re Ryerson, Macdonnel, our books being translated, and the card from Carlos Smith; I wondered what had initiated any Framework 2 connections for us via Spain, since we had no interests of note there.)

(Last August Jane received a letter from Nelson Hayes, who was one of her professors at Skidmore. Actually, it was a note from him to Prentice-Hall, asking for review copies of the Seth books, and that his note be forwarded to Jane. He wanted her to write him. I kept the letter, finding it after it had been initially misplaced, feeling for some reason that Jane shouldn't answer it at the time: I trusted my intuitions, then. This was before Seth began the Frameworks 1 and 2 material, I believe. Jane mentioned the note at various times, wondering what had happened to it.)

(I gave her the note finally on Sunday, and she answered it, so we'll see what develops, if anything. I now felt that it was okay to answer it. She agreed that perhaps originally she wasn't ready to handle it, for whatever reasons. I give this information here because it crops u in the session tonight.)

(After supper we discussed various attitudes about work, art, writing, and other subjects that we'd held over the years. Time, money, and so forth. These subjects also show up in the session.)

(A note: This noon, Tuesday, I mailed to P/H Jane's manuscript for) James [. She is now working on the epilogue.)

Good evening.

(Good evening, Seth.)

Comments and commentaries.

The Protestant work ethics give you great technology sometimes.

Sometimes they provide a backbone, an impetus, a direction, a framework, in which people not specifically gifted can find a place, sometimes.

Protestant work ethics do not produce great art, and they can finally undo the good that they have done, by turning all work into a meaningless performance in which the product itself becomes a means to an end, and loses any esthetic value.

The Protestant work ethics lack exuberance. The men who have succeeded within it, the inventors for example, never really fit within its confines. To a certain extent, of course, the impetus in an industrial society is upon throwaway achievement and mass-produced goods. A certain amount of time spent assembling a certain product, performing the same motions over and over on an assembly line, will at the end of a certain eriod give you a certain number of assembled items. Creativity is the one thing not needed, for the products are to be put together in a fairly regimented fashion.

There are variations, and actually James has explained the natural background there, for it is all tied in with religious, psychological, and scientific beliefs.

In that framework, you each found yourselves artistically gifted. While you went to art school, you recognized that in larger terms art cannot be taught, merely basic techniques. Ruburt recognized that no one can teach you to write. You could not therefore count on a series of well-known steps to bring you to your own, as a carpenter or a doctor, or a dentist (humorously) can.

You had no social or cultural framework, then, ready-made for you to follow. Nor did you have any certainty that any self-imposed period of training and learning would succeed in leading you to your goals. In ractical terms your goals were nebulous enough, in that there would be no degrees granted you, to say you had achieved them. You also had to survive economically.

Ruburt's reading in college, and his friends there, led him to believe that the artistically gifted were not too well equipped to handle normal living. He thought they were fascinating, charming, self-destructive, and wasted most of their time in emotional and sexual excursions leading nowhere. He was determined not to fall into that trap. He did not realize that the people he knew --- Nelson Hayes, for example, and Mauzet---were not basically artists, in this case writers. They would never write the books they talked about. But he made his judgment.

You had highly conflicting ideas about "the world of working people" and the world of the artist. You both made many artificial divisions there, but over the years you became determined, both of you, to spend as much or more time at your work as our hypothetical working man in the factory.

[In a manner of speaking] , and in the terms of this discussion, you adapted the methods of the Protestant work ethics to your creative endeavors. Lest people decide that you were lax or lazy or irresponsible, you were determined to show that you not only worked as hard as they did, but harder. They might have vacations, but not you.

They might quit at five, but not you. I am speaking here of you both. To some degree, you squeezed your exuberance into a tight fit, and tried to make a creative productivity regulate itself, to fit the industrial time clock: so many hours bringing a feeling of virtue, even if the attitude itself cut down on the exuberance of inspiration.

Ruburt as a woman took all precautions so that he would not be considered frivolous. The creative abilities do follow your conscious intents to some degree. One portion of you is not blind to the needs of other portions. The creative abilities are quite capable of helping your hysical survival, economically speaking, when they are freely followed.

[To some degree] you both decided that you would ration your freedom. You cannot ration freedom---you have it or you give it up.

What attitudes do you have that still linger? How do you communicate them to each other? You both want Ruburt to walk normally now, and you are seeing results in terms of body releases and improvements. In the ast you have been in the habit of putting off "distractions" until this or that book was finished until you were sure that you could cope with freedom. If Ruburt were better completely tomorrow, would he suddenly want to disrupt the whole applecart before ["Unknown"] was finished, and go to Florida?

(If he was, and did, I'd go.)

That question, with its implications, for I have simply taken one example of your fears, is to some extent in each of your minds. Can you handle the possibility of normal activity?---and I tell you that you can. The change of beliefs and feelings, the acceptance of freedom mentally, will vastly accelerate both of your creative abilities, releasing on both of your parts energy that has been withheld.

(10:13.) It has been withheld because you have not understood your creative natures. Your own are obviously not limited to art, per se, or art would have satisfied you so completely, and taken your attention so completely, that you would not have looked in other areas at all, so there is a place meant for you, in which your artistic---meaning painting---writing, and intellectual capacities form a synthesis in which all those abilities take part, and are fulfilled. Spontaneity knows its own order.

In Framework 2 your abilities from birth seek their fulfillment, not at your expense , not despite your own best interests. Your biology, your abilities, your mind and your emotions, are not conflicting elements, one battling the others so that you must fight to attain your goals. In Framework 2, effortlessly all atterns are set into motion at your birth, opening up innumerable robable pathways, each leading to the best fulfillment of your otential, so that events, chance encounters, everything works together.

You both believed you had to fight to survive---particularly as artists---against the society; and Ruburt believed he must fight his own biology.

Your purposes merged. You felt that you had to isolate yourselves [to some extent] from the world not because you wanted to, which would be all right; and to some extent you wanted to, but because you felt you must. You did not grant that others would understand your ursuits. Or if they did, you felt, they would not honor your intent.

Creativity has its own ebbs and flows. It uses time, but is not used by it. It is not regular as clockwork. It takes time to paint or write, but the great inspirations of painting and writing transcend time, and the feeling of freedom and exuberance can give you in a few hours creative inspirations that have nothing to do with the time involved.

The Spanish connection is important not because of Spain, but because of its international implications: the newer, broader field of your own thought. A small clue in a larger pattern, that your name and works are beginning to [pop up] more and more in other countries a ripple in an ever-increasing area of activity.

The instances of Framework 2 activity as you become aware of them will show you the true nature of creativity, and acquaint you with the mental feeling of freedom and spontaneity. You have not understood the connections between your work and your life. A problem in a painting or in a book might be solved through an hour's lovemaking, for often what might seem to be a problem of technique is, as you are beginning to understand, an emotional equation instead. None of your impulses are meaningless. You cannot separate your work from your life. Spontaneity [as you understand it now] , in the light of your knowledge, can only add to your work, for it is not meaningless license, nor is it composed of impulses contrary to your work.

Spontaneity as you are aware of it represents the force of your being, with a full knowledge of your work and intents. It is the voice of inspiration, whether or not you recognize it as such. End of session, or take a break as you prefer.

("We'll take the break.")

(10:35--11:05.) If you are born into a time that does not seem conducive to your talents, it is because that society offers needed counterpoints to questions that concern you, or because it provides a articular kind of framework that will color your abilities in a certain direction, bringing out nuances or accomplishments not possible otherwise.

If you are a creator in those terms, you will use any society as a part of your medium. You think of a work of art as composed, say, of a theme or overall design, of various techniques and personal idiosyncrasies; and yet works of art, while transcending time, are indelibly impressed by the times also. A Rembrandt living today would be an entirely different Rembrandt, granted that he used his gifts fully.

You have used your own abilities, both of you, and done well with them despite your overly protective attitudes toward them, and despite methods you used, Ruburt in particular, to insure their use. You cannot cut down physical freedom without inhibiting creative freedom, so to some extent Ruburt's methods have inhibited his creativity. You cannot inhibit spontaneity in one area and not in another, but he did not get it properly through his head that spontaneity did not mean license, or that spontaneity was going to work against his work if he gave it half a chance. (Very intently.)

His intent in Framework 2 was so clear that his creative spontaneity was retained to a large degree despite the blankets he threw upon it. He equated, again, the writer or poet as highly gifted but emotionally not stable, so that he thought he had to set himself against his own nature in order to produce.

This is bound to inhibit creative inspiration to some degree. He felt he needed financial freedom in order to work, but in those terms work was equated with the Protestant work ethics, where spontaneity was frowned upon. Artistic work will show its own regularity. It will find its own schedules, but your joint ideas of work hours were meant to fit in with a time-clock puncher's mentality, and not your own.

Left alone, you would both work many hours, but under completely different mental conditions. Left alone, you would both have altered your schedules simply because creative work enjoys variety. You would each have had periods where you worked nights for a while, and then days, or whatever, or when you began work at eight and worked until one in the morning. But you would have felt free to follow the inner scheduling.

In Framework 2, your writing abilities were also known, of course, and they continue to develop, continue to seek for outlet, continue to search for a pattern; despite your relative abandonment of them, they came to the fore. It may not seem so, but only your ideas of time, and not time itself, relatively closes your mind to the idea of a book of your own. For once stated, that desire ---which is a desire---would lead to insights and inspirations that would collect in odd hours, scribbled down in a few moments, that would lead quite easily to a finished product.

I want Ruburt, again, to encourage spontaneity in all areas, and to trust that the spontaneity is the result of quite orderly sequences in Framework 2, and of larger patterns of creativity that are not yet consciously apparent. I want him to allow for greater physical spontaneity, to perform a physical act when he feels like it, and for greater psychic and creative spontaneity, both in his working hours and outside them; to concentrate on creativity, not time; for then you use time and it does not use you.

(11:29.) If he feels like a nap, there is a reason for it. He may not be relaxed enough of mind so that that particular nap yields what it is supposed to; then he becomes angry for the lost time. He is afraid that if he trusts himself he will not work the proper number of hours. That is what you have taught each other, as if your natural drives and abilities would not automatically seek their own expression within time, but must be forced to do so.

You began all of this out of natural intent, natural characteristics, natural leanings, because that is the way you are, naturally . Those abilities will naturally work in and through time, without force. You are not going to be interrupted that much. Your worries interrupt you far more, and those interruptions that do occur are often gift horses, providing in another form precisely what you need in your work at that time.

End of session. Read it together. Use it creatively, in time and out of it. My heartiest regards.

("Thank you, Seth. Good night.")

(11:35 PM.)