“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:00.) I want here to stress the basic playful exercising aspects of creativity. When a child indulges in physical play, it exercises its muscles and its entire body. No one has to tell a child to play, for playing comes naturally. Playful games in childhood, not dictated by teachers or parents, often give clear indications of a child’s abilities and leanings. You can sense by watching a child’s play the future shape that his or her life can most productively take. The child does not consciously exercise his or her legs so that they will be strong, but simply joyfully follows the inner impulse to do so.

Now: creativity is basically a mental proposition, a mental or psychic activity. It is also, like physical exercise, an energizing phenomena, one that expands and extends the mental and psychic properties as surely as physical exercise develops the body’s being. (Pause.) What you are dealing with, then, in creativity is a continuing kind of psychic play, an activity that probes into the nature of inner reality and explores it with as much sheer vitality as that with which the child explores physical reality. The child runs, falls down, skips, spins, climbs, swings, tries out its body in as many ways as possible, and naturally explores the body’s relationship with its environment. Then the child explores the environment itself.

Beside this, the child, almost from its first moment of clear awareness, begins to play with its own consciousness, and in the same fashion. What can its thoughts do? Where can its thoughts go? Where do its thoughts go? How long can it hold a thought? And later—can a thought be held mentally as an object can be physically? Long before a child learns to place one playblock on top of another, it has already learned to mentally stack one thought upon another, so to speak.

(Long pause.) As a child, with no preconceived ideas in normal terms, you drew and wrote stories. Ruburt wrote stories or poems, and drew. The natural impulses were allowed their free play. Later you believed that artists should be artists. The concentration in painting should be so intense—should be—that there would be no thought of any other occupation. The concerns of the world, its progress or lack of it, the nature of existence—none of those issues would interfere with such an artistic vision.

The inner creative man knows, as the child did, that the way will be cleared. There was Miss Bowman, there was art school and so forth—so I want you to remember that inner man. Social beliefs, beliefs from childhood or whatever are (underlined) overlays. They are superficial. They have unfortunate effects only when you do not trust the inner self.