“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.