“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

ASSEMBLY-LINE TIME VERSUS NATURAL, CREATIVE TIME. THE RATIONAL MIND VERSUS THE ARTISTIC MIND.

(9:05.) Such a cultural time works well overall for the civilization that concentrates upon partialities, bits and pieces, assembly lines, promptness of appointments, and so forth. It fits an industrialized society as you understand it.

The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth’s own time, however. The creator’s time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in your society you make a great effort to fit the creator’s time into what I will call assembly-line time. If you are a writer or an artist, then it seems that you must produce so many paintings or books or whatever as, say, an automobile worker must process so many pieces of the overall car chassis. Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that “each minute is valuable” — but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it.

The same thing happened to Ruburt, and to some extent, with some individual variations, the same causes were involved. When you were both working on those projects your cultural time was taken up in a way you found acceptable. Creative time and cultural time to some extent merged, in that you could see daily immediate evidence of creativity’s product, coming out of the typewriters, say, like any product off an assembly line. You were “using” time as your cultural training told you to do.

(9:25.) When the projects were done, particularly with Ruburt, there was still the cultural belief that time should be so used (underlined), that creativity must be directed and disciplined to fall into the proper time slots. In other words, to some extent or another he tried to use an assembly-line kind of time for your creative productivity. This may work when manuscripts are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall you are using the “wrong” approach to time, particularly for any creative artist. This again applies particularly to Ruburt, though you are not exonerated in that regard (with some humor.

(9:39.) Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations. If the proper creative and magical orientation is kept primarily in mind, other things will fall into place. You do not say to the creative self, “Now it is 7:30. People are at their assembly lines. I am at my desk: produce.”

Assembly-line time does not really value time — only as time can be used for definite prescribed purposes. In that framework, to enjoy time becomes a weakness or a vice, and both of you to some extent have so considered time. With creative people strongly gifted, as in your cases, the natural person is very prominent, no matter what you do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints.

I say wrong, meaning no moral judgment, but the application of one method to a pursuit that cannot be adequately expressed in such a fashion. The assembly-line time and the beliefs that go along with it have given you many benefits as a society, but it should not be forgotten that the entire framework was initially set up to cut down on impulses, creative thought, or any other activities that would lead to anything but the mindless repetition of one act after another (intently).