This chapter's "Reading Guide" and "Chapter Highlights" were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text is from Mike's commentary; block quotes are Seth's original words (the part Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter contrasts "assembly-line time" with "natural creative time," pointing out that artistic creation follows natural time and is not limited by physical time. Seth points out that Jane and Rob treated creative work and life in a rational way, devoting every minute to productive work, which led to conflict, dissatisfaction, and physical difficulties. He emphasizes that true creativity comes from relaxing and enjoying the moment, that the rational approach is only suited to objective measurement, and that the magical approach is the natural way to handle life's problems, achieve goals, and earn wealth.
Chapter Highlights
- Assembly-line time applies to repetitive, standardized work, but not to artistic creation or to handling life as a whole.
- Artistic creation follows natural creative time, is not limited by physical time, and is often completed outside sequential time.
- True creativity comes from enjoying moments and relaxation, not from using every minute for productive work.
- The rational approach applies to objective measurement and calculation; it cannot be used to solve subjective problems or for artistic creation.
- The magical approach is a natural way of living and can actually change the way you handle problems, achieve goals, and earn wealth.
Main Text
Assembly-Line Time and Natural Creative Time
Today I will continue introducing to everyone the content of the first session of the Seth book The Magical Approach. The title of this session contrasts "assembly-line time" with "natural creative time," and then "the reasoning mind versus the artistic mind." This session began on Wednesday evening, August 6, 1980, at 8:48. Beginning with this book, the sessions are no longer counted as session numbers--I do not know why there is no numbering; this book completed itself in the course of the process.
First, Seth says:
Now everything is as it usually is, and we will begin in our own way.
That is, the three of them continued together to transmit the Seth material. He says:
You and Ruburt, in your recent series of joint activities--including your dreams and Ruburt's and your own notes--are all moving in the right direction. You are dealing with issues that are important to you personally and that also have a far broader impact.
This magical orientation is quite interesting for Jane and Rob personally, and from a broader perspective it is also a very important, impactful issue for many more people. What does "impactful" mean? It challenges the cognition of all humanity. He says:
The natural person is indeed the magical person.
The very first sentence tells you: every one of you is magical. And as for this kind of activity, you two have recently had some concrete examples to some degree--what activity? Magical activity. The example he is referring to is the camera incident. He says:
You have been trying, past and present, to teach yourselves some things, but it takes considerable time to clarify these matters, and it still takes time to clearly understand and comprehend them. But your actions and experience are, of course, the result of your beliefs.
Framework 2 has always been a rather fascinating but mainly hypothetical framework. Did you all catch that? Seth says that this Framework 2 is a hypothetical framework--that is, he is telling you that there is such a thing, but because it is impossible to describe the understanding of multi-dimensional, simultaneous existence across multiple times and spaces, he gives you a kind of hypothetical framework and postulates that Framework 2 exists. Because:
In your terms, neither of you has really been able to think of any way to use it.
Because if you cannot think of how to use it, then for you it is as good as nonexistent--but that does not mean it is not operating. Here you need to understand: Framework 2 is operating, but the model of Framework 2 is a hypothetical one; it is just that you have not gotten the kind of feedback you wanted. In other words, you want to manifest things from Framework 2 in real life, in Framework 1, and then you find that it does not work. You will feel that Framework 2 itself is something useless--since you feel it is useless, it is the same as nothing for you.
He says:
When you two were both focused and invested in the project you have just finished, relatively speaking, you also allowed many of your inner experiences to slip by unnoticed. Nevertheless, you were still working together. Then an idea came to you, an important idea, allowing you to interpret, in your own way, the information in Framework 2.
Interpret it in your own method, understand it in your own way, and you then had immediate feedback. A creative interaction--what interaction? It included your dreams and the camera. He says:
Obviously, you were both struck by the magical ease with which you seemed to perceive the information and then acted on it.
What does he mean by this? It means that you two seemed to be able to perceive that kind of telepathic information, but you did not even notice that you possessed this information--you did not actually feel "I seem to know that Jane wants me to go take a photo of her," or "Jane is interpreting my dream, and there is telepathy between us." In your mind there was no perception of telepathy; you did not even notice that you had this information, yet you acted on it--although you did not perceive that Jane wanted you to go take the photo, in action you directly picked up the camera and went. This is very magical.
He then speaks of Ruburt's notes:
In some of Ruburt's notes that you have not yet seen, there is further important insight into this kind of activity.
Ruburt wrote some notes in the afternoon after looking at those impressions, and Rob had not actually seen them yet. He says:
In fact, the point is to accept a different overall orientation.
What orientation?
Indeed, not the orientation of any secondary appendage, but a basic part of human nature.
It is the importance of a most basic orientation of human nature, not a secondary appendage. He says:
As stated in your own notes and in Ruburt's notes, Ruburt is somewhat clearer. This involves a completely different relationship between the self you know and time. Here, you can see some connections between Ruburt's camera experience and your own recent dreams.
Ruburt has deeper insight in his own notes; the insight is that it involves how people view this world, a most basic importance concerning human nature--an overall way of seeing things will change, including a completely different cognition of time. He says:
Some important misunderstandings about time are the cause of a large part of Ruburt's many difficulties... and are also the cause of your own problems, though to a lesser degree.
What problem? It is an important misunderstanding about time; he will explain what misunderstanding below. He says:
All of this involves a more natural, and therefore magical, way of dealing with reality.
In your experience, and in the experience of any animal, there is undoubtedly a natural physical time. This involves the rhythms of the seasons, such as day and night, the tides, and so on. As far as that physical time is concerned, it is involved in the biology of the earth. There is no basic cultural time--that is, the purely biological time, purely physical time, the alternation of sun and moon, the changing of the seasons. But onto this natural rhythm you have quite civilly added clocks, moments, hours, and various other concepts, and you have placed them above the natural rhythms. What he means is that we human beings created artificial time--that is, our present clocks, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and so on--and this clock time of ours has been placed above natural physical time.
He says:
Overall, such a cultural time is quite suitable for civilized activities concentrated on biases, trivial matters, assembly lines, punctual appointments, and so forth.
Cultural time is humanity's artificial time, clock time. We live in today's industrialized society and cannot do without this time--if we did not have this time, we could not meet with others, and we could not carry out science, production, education, and all kinds of activities; airplanes, trains, and the internet go without saying. Therefore this kind of cultural time is needed.
But:
The time involved for any creative artist is indeed one that follows the earth's own time... even so, in your society, you often try hard to fit the creator's time into what I call assembly-line time.
The English phrase is assembly-line time: the assembly line--the flow-line workshop, automobile assembly, parts production, conveyor belts carrying parts along, one process after another. He says an artist is more following the earth's time, the natural time of the seasons, but we humans insist on imposing on it a cultural time, an artificial time.
If you are a writer or a painter, you seem to have to produce so many paintings or write so many books--no matter what you do, it is the same for any artistically creative thing. Just as an auto worker must assemble a certain number of car chassis, we place the same demand on artists: we demand that Hollywood produce a certain number of films per year, that directors or screenwriters produce so many scripts and shoot so many television dramas per year. He says:
Especially if you want to make a living from your paintings.
If you are not earning a living, you may say, "I am very ethereal, floating beyond worldly affairs, painting however I want, painting as many as I want"--but if you have not yet reached such a state, if your living conditions do not yet allow it, and you still have to earn a living by painting, then what mindset do you fall into? "Every minute is precious"--you will not waste time, because every minute of yours must be used to create paintings, and the paintings must be sold for money. You mean that every minute must have productive value.
This is what we humans are often instilled with from childhood: "Time is money." So every minute has value and you cannot waste it. But:
No matter what you do with each moment, in fact the moment itself must necessarily be valuable.
Every moment in your life is valuable; every moment is a magical moment. You do not necessarily have to produce something--it is not only painting, writing novels, or doing creative work that has value. You may be sitting around idly, taking a nap, relaxing, teasing cats and dogs, and these all seem to be worthless things. Seth tells you: No, every minute has value; every second and every moment has its own value, only we do not know it.
He says:
For many reasons that we have discussed before, Ruburt culturally feels that every moment must be devoted to work.
This is a very interesting matter; Jane keeps an especially tight grip on her time. I have introduced before that in this earlier period she had already written twelve books on her own, and had also transmitted six books for Seth, and was now delivering the seventh book--so she had already produced eighteen books. He says:
To some degree, you have the same feeling.
Rob is the same; he also feels that time must be used well. In real life there are very many people like this; we even have a discipline called "time management"--every working person or young person entering society has to learn how to manage their time effectively.
But as I have said, artistic creation operates according to the time of the seasons and so on; it is a natural time. But this natural time is very different from what you ordinarily assume:
It is far richer, and it will, according to its own situation, move inward, outward, backward, and forward.
This natural time is very different from what we understand; it is far richer than the time we understand. It has its own conditions, and according to its own conditions it can freely move outward and inward--how can time move inward? How can time move outward? And how can it move backward? We understand time as only able to move forward; how can it also move backward? So here it goes beyond our most basic cognition of time.
He says:
When you are dreaming, your natural and magical self uses this information that lies outside the time framework experienced by what you call the reasoning mind.
When you are dreaming, you jump out of your reasoning self, outside the time framework of rational experience. Creativity operates in the same way--when creating a painting, creating some poem, or writing a song, this kind of creative work is done in the same way as dreaming. When you are dreaming, the time you use lies outside your present time framework, which is why a yellow millet dream can last several decades, and an entire life can pass. That time is not the same as this time.
He says that when you create it is the same; the time you use in creating is this kind of time, not limited by your physical time. That is why many artists tell you that when they are creating, they are in a state of self-forgetfulness and do not know how much time has passed. Many artists also need to live in the mountains, in a very quiet place, relatively disconnected from the environment--it is not necessarily that they want to appear so special, different, lofty, pure, and ethereal. No. Once Seth explains it, you will understand: it is because under the time framework familiar in our daily human society, it is very hard for them to bring out their creativity, and this creativity is often interrupted by this kind of time. Soon it is time to eat, soon there is a gathering, or there is a meeting, or the publisher may arrange a conference call--these things are completely disastrous for people doing artistic creative work.
Therefore, they should be as undisturbed as when dreaming. If you wake someone from a dream, can the dream continue? If you wake someone engaged in artistic creation from that dreamlike time, how can they continue creating? Can you go back and continue that same dream? You cannot. This is why many people do not understand why artists must be in a quiet environment in order to have creativity; Seth has already explained this very clearly.
He says:
It appears within sequential time, but its main work, however, is done entirely outside sequential time.
Dreaming certainly only happens at night, and it certainly occupies a period of time, seemingly within our sequential time--you may say dreaming also occurs within physical time, but it also transcends this time. In physical time you may have slept only eight hours and dreamed for three hours, but the events you experienced in the dream may have lasted several years, or even more. So what relationship do those years experienced in the dream have to the three hours? No relationship. Your dream is accomplished outside this sequential time, and artistic creation is also done outside this sequential time.
He says:
When you completed your project, you felt sad for several days, but you noticed this emotion of yours and turned yourself around quite beautifully. In that regard, you have good reason to feel proud.
Many artists are not ecstatic after finishing a creative work; many people find themselves very sad after finishing--because they have come out of that time and returned to real society, returned to sequential time. Why sad? After completing the work, when they have to return to the real world from the ecstasy of creation that is beyond reality and outside time, that feeling is very lost and sad.
He says Rob did very well on this point--he turned around very beautifully, and the same thing happened to Ruburt, although with some individual differences in degree, but for the same reasons:
When you two were both carrying out those projects, your cultural time was used in a way that you felt was acceptable.
Our artificial time was used in a way you found acceptable--you were doing creative work, so the day had results. And creative time and cultural time had merged to some extent: if you did a painting in one morning or one afternoon, you would feel a great sense of accomplishment. But after you finished, you would feel that this time had been wasted, because you had not created anything further.
He says:
Therefore, each day you could see immediate evidence of the products of creativity coming out of the typewriter.
One is a writer and one is a painter--for Jane it was manuscript pages clattering out of the typewriter; for Rob, because he helped organize and record the Seth material, many typed pages also came out every day, pile after pile of neat manuscript. These were their works, just like a painter's paintings or a composer's pieces. He says:
Just as any product is made on an assembly line... you were using this time in the way your cultural training taught you to do.
You did not idle away your time; you used this time to do so much work. But when the work is finished:
Especially for Ruburt, he still holds the cultural belief that time should be used in this way, and that creativity must be directed and trained to fall into the proper empty slots of time.
Simply put: when the work is finished, when a novel is completed, Ruburt would feel that he did not know what to do with the following time; he felt that this time was wasted, so he felt sad and miserable inside, with a feeling of having nothing to do. Yet to some degree, he was indeed trying to use assembly-line time to produce your creative products. When you were typing manuscripts and doing a great deal of physical labor, this could work--assembly-line time is possible for physical labor, for work that requires the hands. But overall:
You are using time in a wrong way, especially for any creative artist.
Seth points out the problem in Rob and Jane: look at these two spiritually advanced people, who had transmitted material for Seth for seventeen years, and yet they were still not enlightened spiritually. They still worked like highly efficient people--constantly writing books, painting, writing poetry and publishing, and they felt that only these things had value. He says:
Once again, Ruburt especially is prone to this fault... although in this regard, you are no exception either.
Seth says this with a bit of humor: you two are both the same. In our simple words, they were workaholics--they could not bear not working. He says:
Here, I want to give you a great deal of information so that you can understand different ways of dealing with reality, and how those ways then create the events you experience.
This is very important. He says:
Neither of you has yet really prepared to completely change your intent.
Are you ready? Every listener here and every reader, you have studied the Seth material, studied Seth books, studied spiritual things, and many people say, "The Seth material is so good, so wonderful"--but after saying it is so good, have you changed your life according to it? Have you truly changed your life according to Seth's ideas, theories, and experiences?
Many people ask: Why did Jane pass away at such a young age? I have explained many reasons before; here you can see one reason--although Jane was transmitting a great deal of material, she was not living according to Seth's material at all, nor was she putting the Seth material into practice. She followed her existing habitual thinking and habitual action patterns, rushing against time and rushing through work like a diligent writer. Therefore, the two of them simply were not ready.
He says:
You are approaching that threshold.
Approaching it. As Ruburt also mentioned in his notes:
The magical approach means that you actually change your methods of handling problems, achieving goals, and earning wealth.
He mentions three here--in fact far more than that, it changes every aspect of your whole life. The magical approach means that you can actually--remember, actually, not theoretically--change how you handle problems in life, how you achieve the goals in your heart, and how you earn wealth.
This Seth book, The Magical Approach, is, so to speak, a summarizing and consolidating book following The Nature of Personal Reality and Seth Speaks regarding personal development. We pair it with The Master Key System practice1--a whole half-year of twenty-four weeks of practice methods--so that in daily life, through practical application and Seth's theoretical exposition on the magical approach, we can truly open up the magical approach that belongs to each of us.
He says:
You change over to the natural person's way... then they will truly become part of your personal experience.
Don't become a socialized person; become a natural person and return to nature. Then the magical approach truly becomes a part of your personal life experience, and your life will be filled with magic everywhere. He says:
The magical approach is no longer an occult method, but you must believe that they are natural methods.
This magical approach is a most natural method; people were originally supposed to use these methods to handle problems and meet challenges. It is not at all magical, not some secret, not sorcery, and even less some secret practice. This is the way everyone should be using, and we simply used it wrongly before.
I will use the word "method" because only in this way can you understand, but actually, what we are talking about is a way of life.
Seth says: here I seem to be telling you about methods--various methods of earning wealth, achieving goals, handling problems--but in fact this is not merely a method; it is your way of life, the magical or natural way of life. So now you know what this book The Magical Approach is about: it teaches us how to apply Seth's knowledge and Seth's material in daily life, and how to live out a magical and natural way of life in practice.
He says:
That is the human version of the animals' natural instinctive behavior in the universe.
Animals themselves can all do it--the human version of the animals' natural instinctive behavior in the universe is the natural way, is the magical approach. He says:
That way indeed directly conflicts with the methods you have been taught and learned.
Here you must remember: the series of things he will discuss in this book directly conflicts with the education we ordinarily receive and the ideas instilled by tradition--you will see later on that they directly conflict. So you must prepare yourself mentally. He says:
You have clung to those methods to varying degrees... because in any case, the whole world seems to operate that way.
Other people all do it this way, others all do it that way--why should I not do it? Wouldn't I seem out of place? It is not just me; everyone does it this way. We were taught to do this from childhood, and others do it too. These worldly methods are the common methods by which we handle things; the people, affairs, groups, and nations around you all use such methods in dealing with problems.
However:
With your experiences of the past few days, weren't you both astonished that work could be done with magical ease, and that events outside space and time could be perceived, and so forth?
That is, the communication with Seth, the completion of work, being able to write twelve books and also transmit six Seth books, and all these magical things. He says:
All of that can be transferred to other areas of your life, especially for Ruburt... in the difficulties of the body.
Because by this time Ruburt's body was already very uncomfortable, and his mobility was already impaired--rheumatoid arthritis, very severe rheumatism, and his whole leg had begun to twist. He says:
I understand very well that this is a matter of common concern to you... and when I know that you come to these sessions wanting clear answers, I have always given you as much as I could.
In other words, in their hearts the two of them were actually the same as ordinary readers, both concerned about: Why couldn't Seth step in and help Jane, and cure her physical illness? Seth says: What I should give you and what I could give you, I have already given you, but you did not use it--you used it in writing books, in creative painting, in writing poetry, and in publishing one novel after another. Have you ever taken this ability and this experience, and even freed up part of the time to do healing for your own body?
Every day, the moment you open your eyes and get up, you are thinking about how to write, how to paint, how to create; have you ever cared about your own life? Have you ever thought about the problems arising in your own body, and solved them? Previously, Seth had given many very incisive explanations about Jane's body, but the two of them just listened--they did not take any actual action. That included, before they moved, in that apartment, putting the refrigerator in the bathroom, the position of the bed, asking them to hang a curtain between the bathroom and the bedroom, and so on--they did not do any of these things. Seth's meaning is: can you transfer this magical way of handling things in artistic creation to other areas of life? For Jane, can you transfer it to her body?
He says:
It seems that the best way to get clear answers is to clarify the questions you want to ask, and the reasoning mind will first imagine something like a list of questions.
If you want to know the problem you are now facing, you have to first ask the question before I can give you an answer. So in this regard:
Ruburt's reaction before such a session is natural, and also very magical. Because he knows that no matter what he has been taught, at some level of consciousness and to some degree he must forget those questions and the moods accompanying them, in order to create at another level of consciousness the appropriate atmosphere, the atmosphere that allows answers to come, even if perhaps in a way different from what the reasoning mind expects.
If you want to solve a problem or ask for an answer, you first have to state the problem clearly. Otherwise, if you cannot even state the problem clearly, no one can give you an accurate answer. And Seth says that in the course of Jane's life, look at what she did in the preface: she made a great deal of preparation—moved to a little house, got manuscript paper, a printer, ribbons, all her notes and materials ready, and then she also needed to create an atmosphere for herself—seeing the flowers, leaves, scenery, and so on. What was that atmosphere for? It was conducive to receiving the answer. What answer? The creative inspiration that Jane wanted.
What Seth did not say outright is this: you, Jane, know that when it comes to creative inspiration, you need to do all this, but when it comes to solving the problems in your life, why don't you do the same? You know that when you create, you can make lists, find that feeling, enter that trance state, make contact with Seth, cultivate an atmosphere, and even know to drink a little wine—but when facing your own health problems and other problems in life, why don't you bring a list of problems and bring that atmosphere to ask for the answers? Maybe you really do not care that much, and you do not really want to know the answer to these problems—as for how your body can get better, on the surface you look very anxious and distressed, but in reality you have not really spent time or energy on solving it.
In real life many people are like this too: their body has problems, their life has problems—do they solve them? They tell you they are solving them every day; they tell you they are sick to death of it—facing their unhappy family, unhappy marriage, unhappy workplace, unhappy career, they complain every day. You ask them, "Did you solve it?" "I solved it; I solve it every day." But if you carefully observe their life, what are they doing? They have not solved it. They are just like Jane; most people's lives are just like Jane's—they have not solved it. They are like a worker on an assembly line, like a worker on a production line, frantically doing the day-after-day work that they think is valuable. They face assembly-line time all day and work frantically; they think only this is valuable and meaningful, otherwise time is wasted. Seth did not put it so harshly; he was just hinting at them in this way.
Seth said:
With your joint agreement, and I hope also with your joint enthusiasm...
He wanted to change their ideas about life, and even to change their old belief systems from the past, and he hoped that you both would have shared enthusiasm. He said:
I am going to have several sessions discussing the magical approach to dealing with reality.
Actually this course is not long, seventeen sessions in all. Seventeen sessions is very short within the Seth material—he usually needs more than seventy sessions for a book, so you know seventeen sessions is already very short. He said:
To create that kind of atmosphere, especially the atmosphere in which answers are experienced.
To get answers, you have to cultivate that atmosphere, and that atmosphere has to be obtained through the magical approach. He said:
Trying to fit great creative thrust into assembly-line time is itself bound to produce conflict, dissatisfaction, or frustration.
You take the vitality of artistic creation, the creative power of art, and ask it to follow assembly-line time—for example, a writer sits down at eight in the morning to write a novel and stops at noon—this cannot be done. Many writers often sit there for days, weeks, even months without writing a single word. When he has no inspiration, forcing him to sit there every day is useless. Seth says that if you put this artistic thrust together with traditional assembly-line time, conflict is inevitable.
He said:
If you first keep in mind the proper creative and magical orientation, then everything else will fall into place.
You have to do this first; you have to learn to use time outside of time. Do not think that time is only assembly-line time—all your creative work is done outside of this time, just like dream time. It seems to be above this continuous time, yet it is outside it.
I once gave an example before, and I want to emphasize it again here in the hope that you can understand. If we take our traditional physical time—or whatever it is called, assembly-line time—and imagine it as a river, then the time of your artistic creation—sometimes we call it psychological time—whatever it is called, you can imagine it as what? Imagine it as a transparent, very light block that can float on this river. You can imagine it as something transparent like glass, but much lighter than glass, a block that can float on this river.
Why like a block? Because your physical time cannot penetrate this block; this block can float above your physical time and drift there. Just like your dreams float above that stretch of time at night. But within this transparent block of time, the length of time that occurs inside is not measured by the length of time in your river of time. It is possible that this one block represents three years, but it may occupy only five minutes in the long river of your time. I am just giving this extreme example, meaning exactly that. It could also be three hours of creative time, which in your ordinary continuous time may be approximately two hours or five hours; it is not fixed. The span of time inside cannot be understood by the span of our physical time. Of course there is a certain conversion relationship and proportion between them, but we need not bother with the details.
I am using this vivid image to help you understand what psychological time is—creative time. It floats above continuous time, but is not affected by it. This continuous time cannot pass through this transparent block; the two seem to overlap. If you look from a distance, those transparent blocks seem less distinct and blend with the river water, but if you look carefully, they are not.
Seth said:
You would not say to the creative self, "It is seven thirty now; everyone is starting on the assembly line, so let us sit down at the table and start producing."
Impossible. Anyone who has done artistic creation knows this is impossible. He says this kind of assembly-line time is not really cherishing time—you feel you have not wasted time, you seem to be cherishing it, but actually:
You have not really cherished time; you have only regarded time as something that can be applied to definite, preset goals.
You treat time as something that can be placed on a predictable, fixed goal—for instance, assembling so many parts, putting together so many phones, assembling so many cars. But artistic creation itself is unpredictable, so how can you set a time for it? He said:
In that state, enjoying time becomes a weakness or a crime.
Under the collective belief framework of "time is money," if you want to enjoy time in a leisurely way, it becomes a weakness in that person—people will say his time management is no good, no large company would want such a person, his time-management ability is too poor; it even becomes a crime—wasting time, everyone will look down on such a person, as if he can't accomplish anything.
He said:
And to some extent you both used to view time in this way.
Both Jane and Rob were like this. To some extent, although both of them are artists—one writing novels and the other painting—as far as creators of great talent are concerned, that is, truly original creators—like that village in Shenzhen where they copy famous paintings every day, painting one in a day or a few days, those don't count—for truly original creators of great talent:
Whatever you do, the natural person is very important.
Whatever you do—to put it crudely, whatever you do nourishes this natural person. You go traveling for pleasure, go gathering material, go live abroad; many people will think, "Oh, look at you showing off," but actually Seth tells you: for those natural persons, these things are needed, necessary, and very important. It is not that only burying your head in writing books or painting has real value.
He strongly detests any meaningless restrictions placed on his experience.
Gifted creators extremely dislike anyone imposing meaningless restrictions on their experience—giving him a deadline: "You must deliver a work to me by some month," "You must paint four paintings for me in a month," "You must finish this novel in three months"—these creators extremely detest such restrictions.
For example, they know how to enjoy each day... how to gather creative insights from every encounter.
You think he is doing nothing, as if he is just traveling for pleasure, but in every contact with the world, with reality, with this physical world, he can gather creative insights. He said:
How to enrich their own concrete life through housework or other activities.
Some people enrich their concrete life through doing housework—cooking a meal, doing little chores, planting flowers, tending plants, making oneself a couple of pieces of clothing, doing some gardening, keeping fish. He said:
He does not like being told that he must do things in such-and-such a way under unreasonable restrictions.
He does not want others to tell him what he should do, how he should live, or according to what kind of daily timetable he should work every day—this is what artists detest most.
Seth said:
The natural person is by no means irrational.
Many people think of the natural person as being like a wild man, doing whatever he wants every day. He says they are by no means irrational:
They bring all experience together and transform it.
He takes all experience—remember this: not only the experience you think is related to creation—he obtains experience from every bit and every aspect of life, not just the experiences useful to creation. He said:
You have so many problems because of applying the wrong orientation to your lives and activities.
What wrong orientation? Not using that magical orientation, but using the rational orientation to deal with our lives. When we use the rational orientation to approach the life of artistic creation, we will face problems.
Then many people say: I am not an artist either; what does this have to do with me? Is studying this book useful to me? Is it meaningful? If you have not yet studied what is in the twenty-four-week The Master Key System—ultimately it wants you to discover and find what? To find that you yourself are this creator. Every one of us comes into this world to create; we are not like robots doing repetitive work day after day. Every one of us is a creator; every one of us is a magician—we are not the audience under the stage watching magic; we are the magicians, and we will produce achievements and results that even our souls will be surprised at. This is what we should accomplish and do in coming into this world. Therefore this book is helpful and beneficial to everyone.
Seth said:
By error I do not mean moral judgment... but rather the application of a method to a pursuit that cannot be properly expressed in this way.
When I say error, I do not mean moral judgment, but the application of a method—using the wrong method. I have no moral condemnation or moral viewpoint; I am only saying that you should use this magical orientation to deal with your daily life, and should not use the rational orientation to do so.
As a society:
Humanity's assembly-line time and the beliefs that accompany it have given you many good benefits.
Its benefits are too many, so we need not list them. But:
You should not forget that the whole framework was originally set up precisely to reduce impulse, creative thought, or other activities that would lead to anything beyond mindless repetitive continuity.
This passage means: assembly-line time has indeed brought many benefits to modern society and human civilized society; we must admit it and cannot deny it. But he tells you: never forget that the purpose of the assembly-line time we created is to make you reduce, or not produce—produce what?—those creative things outside the repetitive thinking and work in the brain. To put it simply: our artificial time, this time on a watch, has the purpose of raising our work efficiency—the efficiency of robot-like work, the efficiency of repetitive work. But for creative work that has no repetition, this time is all harm and no benefit.
That kind of industrialized assembly-line production, large-scale industrial production, is useful; but for creative work it has no benefit at all. The establishment of this time was precisely to restrict these creative things—I shouldn't use "destroy"; that word is not quite right, but it is actually in conflict, it conflicts with your creative work, and it is of no help. Seth said:
In other words, the whole framework was originally meant to give you a standardized, mass-produced version of reality.
It has no concept that can—he was rapping on the table as he said—be reasonably applied to creative effort; it was not made for doing your creative work, but for large industrial production. It is a standard of that kind of reality, and you have applied it to every aspect of life.
Seth said:
The orientation that brings you creative achievement lies in the opposite direction.
The orientation that can bring you creative achievement is completely opposite to this rational orientation you are using now, the one that uses assembly-line time. It uses natural time and the magical orientation—its counterparts are our assembly-line time and rational orientation. To put it simply, whenever you want to accomplish anything creative, you must use the magical orientation and natural time, while ordinary time is completely useless to you and can only be counterproductive.
Seth said:
Creativity itself has its own inherent discipline.
For example:
That discipline is a discipline that can, in a dream, search through future days to find the mental information needed for making a certain statement.
By saying this he means: creativity itself has a certain inner regularity. Its regularity is like this: in a dream you search through all the days you have experienced—future days, remember, future days—this has already gone beyond your understanding; how can you search future days? He tells you: what is creativity? Creativity is being able to search through all your future days in a dream just to find the information needed for doing a certain creation, writing a certain novel, painting a certain picture, making a certain sculpture, writing a certain song—these are all a kind of statement—information needed for making a certain statement. That is how it operates. And when you think about how this kind of creativity operates, how can you restrict it with physical time?
Seth said:
All of this information applies to Ruburt's situation... and understanding it can create the atmosphere in which beneficial results will appear.
There has to be that creative atmosphere, an atmosphere suited to his creativeness. He said we would take a break, and then continue.
Ruburt's Situation and True Relaxation
He said:
When Ruburt finished his book The God of Jane, he found he had so much time on his hands that he should use, and he once again became aware of his physical limitations.
What limitations? Apart from work, there was not much he could do. Therefore:
He adopted the rational approach, which is: if you want to solve a problem, you have to worry about it.
This is a problem many people face. After Ruburt finished one book and before he started the next, he did not know what to do with that gap in time—this also reflected one of his limitations: it seemed that apart from writing books, he could do nothing at all. At the same time, he did not want to waste this stretch of time, so he was eager to start the next creative project, but he had no good ideas and no inspiration. What to do then? He found himself thinking, "Okay, I need to solve this problem, I have to face it squarely, I have to worry about it"—I have no ideas, I have no inspiration, I need to worry about this matter.
Meanwhile:
The natural person really did show itself.
You know, when you do that, the natural person will also show itself. Ruburt followed his impulses—the natural person showed itself. When he was idle, the natural person naturally emerged—interpreting dreams for you, interpreting dreams for Rob. It was precisely in the process of interpreting Rob's dreams that a new creative activity was introduced. He took the dreams that Rob had recently recorded in his notes about himself and interpreted them—Jane said she had nothing to do, so she used her psychic ability to interpret Rob's dreams. And in the process of interpreting Rob's dreams, didn't the whole series of things mentioned earlier happen? He said:
You understand, then? That was not work.
Interpreting Rob's dreams was not work at all; it was something done in idle time. What she needed was true relaxation—not proof that she could write, or what she ought to do, or that she must immediately begin another book. What Jane needed was relaxation, not that.
True creativity comes from enjoying these moments.
Remember that? True creativity comes from enjoying these moments. So for people doing artistic creation—opening a company is also creation; building an enterprise into something larger is also a kind of creation. He said:
True creativity comes from enjoying these moments, and those moments then complete themselves... and part of the creative process is indeed the art of relaxation.
Letting go, because that activates the magical activity, and that is what Ruburt must learn. Learn to let go, learn to be idle, learn to enjoy each present moment, each moment; he must learn to enjoy. This art of relaxation is very important—only when you relax can your magical activity be activated. Because relaxation can activate magical activity; if you do not relax, it cannot be activated.
He said:
About the magical approach, I have a great deal to say, and I really think these words will help each of you bring Framework 2 into your experience.
Framework 2 is where all the probabilities reside. When you know how to use the magical approach, it will help you bring the probabilities you want to choose in Framework 2 back into your Framework 1 experience—manifestation. He used so many words, but really it is just one word: manifestation—once you learn the magical approach, you can manifest what you want in physical reality.
He said:
As for Ruburt's present condition, he should not, for example, wear the same pair of jeans for a whole week.
This Ruburt was lazy enough—how sloppy can you get, wearing one pair of jeans for a whole week without changing. He said:
With two or three pairs of trousers, one can change many times.
Think about it: Jane is a woman, and she wore no skirts, just one pair of jeans for an entire week without changing—can you imagine whether she was enjoying life in her day-to-day living? She was not. He said:
As far as the climate is concerned, and for someone whose movement is so restricted... the weather was hot, his underwear was of a poor sort, and he should also change his pajamas more often.
A person with limited mobility is very uncomfortable sitting for long periods—try sitting eighteen hours a day and see; it is very uncomfortable. The weather was hot, and the underwear she wore was also of a very poor sort. Seth was really minding what kind of underwear a woman wore—though of course he had no concept of gender; he was simply mentioning this matter.
He said:
When he talks about an activity, I suggest that he think about it once more; that would be an excellent piece of advice, because it would make him realize how restricted his activity has already become, and again, by following the prescription prescribed by the rational approach, he would worry about it endlessly.
When Ruburt said he was going out for a stroll, to take a walk, wanted to go out and move around, Seth suggested he think more about this matter. Why think more about it? To let him realize for himself how inconvenient his movement had now become, and to let him think about why this had happened. He said:
And you would worry about it endlessly—then he would compare his own present condition with the condition he longed for in his ideal, and those approaches would make him depressed, and would further increase his sensitivity to the heat, to the pressure of the chair, and so on.
The moment you say you cannot walk, then you worry, "I can no longer walk now, my body has deteriorated to this point, what will happen in the future, will it get worse and worse"—do not think in that direction. You should think one layer further: the process by which I can get better. Instead of worrying about your future—worrying through rational means has no meaning at all. Once he thinks of longing to be lively and active but being unable to move, such a comparison will make his mood even lower, and will further intensify his sensitivity to the weather and the discomfort of the chair.
He said:
I want you to understand that we really are dealing with two different ways of being in the world and two different ways of solving problems, which we will here call the rational method and the magical method.
We truly are handling our way of being in the world in two entirely different ways: one is called the rational method, the other the magical method, and we only know how to use the rational method. But:
The rational approach is quite effective in certain situations.
For example, in the mass production of goods, in certain kinds of scientific research, and in scientific measurement. But:
As far as humanity's understanding and use of the rational approach is concerned, on the whole, rational thinking should not be used for the overall handling of life, nor for solving subjective problems; it should be used for objective measurement and calculation.
Simply put, reason is a good thing, but it has to be used in the right place—for repetitive work, measurement, rational analysis, calculation. Our mathematical formula reasoning cannot do without reason. But for the overall handling of life—keep this firmly in mind, for the overall handling of life—you absolutely must not use reason to handle it; this is a mistake people often make. And for solving subjective problems as well, you cannot use reason; you should use the method of the magical approach.
The rational method especially cannot be used in any art.
He said this earlier, and he is emphasizing it again. He said:
Perhaps the following sentence is an old cliché, but the measurement of a ruler has absolutely nothing to do with the measurement of the heart, and they can never be used to express the incalculable measurements automatically made by the smallest cells.
When a painter paints a picture, he certainly does not measure it out with a ruler. We often say a painter's eye is incredibly sharp—he draws the length of every line and the figure with a precision that is beyond description. It looks as if it was drawn casually, but actually one bit more would be too much, one bit less would be too little. The cells are all helping you make measurements. He said:
The rational mind alone, as it is presently used, can never understand the dream measurements you took in order to make that dream.
Here he uses a dream as an example, but this example is actually not very good, because this book has not previously explained that dream, so everyone does not know what that dream actually refers to. What he actually means is this: in the dream state, you have already transcended time and space and crossed different levels of consciousness; trying to analyze that with rational means is impossible and unrealistic.
He said:
Ruburt maintained a strong rational method of dealing with things... to ensure that he would keep his psychic activities under control.
In real life, Jane was extremely strong at handling things rationally; what time she got up every day and what time she sat down at the desk to write were fixed. Why did she emphasize such a rational lifestyle? She was afraid that her psychic side was too strong, so she used this rationality to limit him, to control him—she used the word "control"; interesting, right? She did it deliberately.
Therefore, ironically, in your society—Seth is being ironic here:
This seems the only rational way.
In our society, we think this is what is good and what is right: if a person with such strong psychic abilities does not impose time management and time control, who knows what might happen. So we human society thinks this is good; this is the only reasonable way. He said:
Then your problems are not solved, of course largely because you have adopted the wrong approach... and that is because the two of you have not yet been persuaded; you are still tightly holding on to those acquired beliefs.
You still take the rational approach in handling people, affairs, and earthly matters, and you are still clinging to those beliefs that have been formed and established. He said:
In that respect, Ruburt suffers more than you do.
So Ruburt's body became worse and the illness more severe. He said:
Of course, the old beliefs and the rational approach have been reinforced in every way.
Because they persisted in this rational way of dealing with people and matters, the rational approach and the old beliefs were both strengthened—if you strengthen them, they certainly gain power. So the belief that "time is money, every minute must not be wasted" became very powerful. He said:
If you use the magical approach, and allow yourself to operate in that way, its power will be even greater. Because it has the power of your basic natural orientation.
The rational approach is added on top of it—something artificial added onto the magical approach. He said:
I think the two of you are ready to understand that.
To understand that the rational approach is an artificial addition attached on top of the magical approach. He said:
The material in this session is exactly the material that can really help Ruburt get out of his present predicament.
Do you want to know how Ruburt can really be freed from her pain? Namely the current mobility problems and physical issues—I have already told you here the method for freeing her, but we will continue discussing it in the next session. He said:
I have given you some of this information before, just as I will give you more information in the near future. But looking back at your own recent experience, this information is now more meaningful... and holds special significance. Therefore this time, you really can make good use of it, and I will also try to be more specific.
Actually by this time Seth had already—of course it is now more obvious—Jane's body had already become worse and worse. If Jane still could not change her beliefs, and still could not live according to the magical approach, then her physical condition would only get worse. To put it bluntly, Seth could already foresee that if she did not change, her life would not last much longer. But he could not say this directly; he could only emphasize it in this way. He was earnestly saying, "You really can make good use of it," and "I will try to be more specific"—he had actually already said this many times, repeatedly in previous sessions. But looking back at what had happened recently, this information would now be more meaningful, and "holds special significance"—his words were already very clear, but these two people may not have understood him; I guess they probably did not fully understand. Therefore this time Seth again took the magical approach separately and used seventeen sessions to go over it separately, actually wanting to help the two of them truly change.
He said:
I will also answer any questions you have about your recent dreams and other hints. I am very pleased to come back and be with you again. Well, today's dictation is over; I wish you both a good and magical evening.
This first session is where Seth finished his introduction. You can see Seth's eagerness and his enthusiasm to help the two of them. So when many people ask why Seth did not take care of them—it is not that he did not care; Seth was always helping the two of them. If you have read The Way Toward Health, you know that Seth was earnest and well-meaning to the utmost. But these two people, I can only say, were too stubborn due to their Western education and conditioning—although they were transmitting psychic material, they rarely really applied it to their own lives.
That is all for the contents of this session. I hope it also brings some inspiration to your life—through the things that happened to Jane and Rob, carefully reflect on and examine what your own life is like: are you working day after day on assembly-line time, or are you living, as Seth says, by the magical approach—living freely above time within natural time, rather than being restricted by time in how you live.
注释与核实
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Source: Wikipedia "The Master Key System" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Key_System) ↩