“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The natural man, then, is a natural artist. Children draw, play with images, with language, with the sounds of their voices creatively and artistically. The natural man, the natural person, knows that art provides its own sense of creative power. In a fashion it makes no difference how many other children have drawn circles or triangles with great curious glee, quite astonished at their own power to do so. They may have seen circles or triangles countless times, but the first drawn circle is always original to the drawer, and always brings a sense of power.

Developments of that nature do not come to the young. Other kinds of artistic expression do, of course. Creative people do have more than most an inner sense of their life’s direction, even if they are taught to ignore it. (With amusement:) There is someone I know who tells Ruburt to trust his abilities. Very good advice—but that someone does not always trust his own abilities (louder).

Your artistic abilities know what they are doing. You are not taught to understand creativity, of course. You are not taught how to live with it. If you study mathematics, there is a prescribed course. There are certain specified “facts” for you to learn. A good mathematician can still be a good mathematician while being quite closed off from many of life’s greater values. The artist takes the very qualities of living itself and transforms them into a kind of rarefied esthetic reality.

When you think “I should be thus-and-so along the way,” and so forth, or when you look back into the past and think that those abilities you had then should have matured far earlier in your life, you are doing so of course from a structure of your present. You are looking at a person that exists now in your imagination. Certain portions of that person, as you know, would have been satisfied with drawing comics, or doing certain kinds of commercial work. That person was committed to a love of drawing but not to a life of art. That mind had potential, but potential at that time quite undeveloped, waiting to blossom if it were allowed to. There are many painters who are quite satisfied with themselves—fairly content. Their work is quite mediocre, but they are satisfied. They have lost the tension between the ideal and its manifestation. It has become slack.

Now Ruburt is doing the same thing, of course, and it is often easier for one of you to see when the other is involved in such behavior, than to see when you are yourself. It will be of help, then, if you each reinforce the other’s sense of self-approval, particularly in regard to your artistic and psychic abilities.

Do you have questions?

(It’s Friday evening as I finish typing this session. Yesterday I felt better—with the session half typed—than I have for some time. I also painted better. Today I felt almost as good, but reminded of the session content, which always helped. I also began finishing a painting with a new and free determination, working much more easily than I had been doing. I think the results may be good, and certainly they point the way toward what I want to accomplish with my “portraits.” I feel quite good about the painting endeavor now, and will try to keep things in balance.