“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(My own hassles with my side, groin and scrotum are the usual ones I’ve had at times before—especially last year at this time. My painting hasn’t been going well lately, and I’ve been concerned about that. Actually I’m trying a number of different painting approaches, and think I got sidetracked into too much experimentation, so as I told Jane I’m sure painting is involved in my upsets. However, at various times the pendulum has given me all kinds of other reasons for my physical ills: taxes, money, Jane’s symptoms, success and failure—the works, one might say. I was pretty disgusted and out of sorts by this evening. Still, through it all I’ve been sleeping well and eating okay also. I don’t suppose this description adequately describes the depth of my feelings, since I’ve really been bothered for some time, to the extent that I no longer feel free physically, and once again have contemplated seeking medical help as a last resort.

(A hard, refreshing spring rain, with thunder and lightning, was drumming against the house as we sat for the session. Very invigorating, to coin a phrase. It was warm. As I’ve told Jane several times lately, the renewing rain reminded me once again of the wonders of nature, and I thought once again of living a natural life outdoors in the environment of woods and elements, summer and winter. Maybe I did this in one life or another. But I often feel such stirrings on my late night walks on the hilly, shadowed streets neighboring our own Pinnacle Road.

The web is a work of art, the spider’s home, and the source of his food as well. Although it may seem to your consciousness that one spider web is like any other, this is not true, of course, in the world of spiders. All creatures of whatever degree have their own appreciation of esthetics. They possess the capacity to enjoy esthetic behavior.

I try to straddle your definitions—but flowers, for example, in a fashion see themselves as their own artistic creations (emphatically). They have an esthetic appreciation of their own colors—a different kind, of course, than your perception of color. But nature seeks to outdo itself in terms that are most basically artistic, even while those terms may also include quite utilitarian purposes.

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.

In a sense, painting is man’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his own reality—and by extension to create a new version of reality for his species. It is as natural for man to paint as for the spider to spin his web. The spider has its own kind of confidence, however, and a different organization in which he operates. The spider does not wonder “Is my web as beautiful as my neighbor’s, as meaningful? Is it the best web I can construct?” He certainly does not sit brooding and webless as he contemplates the errors he might make.

If you listened to your own conversations now and then with—if you will forgive me—an objective ear, you could both often cut some of your troubles short, or nip them in the bud. (To me:) You were speaking to your guest John with some evidence of dissatisfaction in your voice, some self-accusation, some irritation, wondering why as a young man you did not make greater breakthroughs in your art. You wondered why at your age you had not come further in your painting, and literally why you did not know what you know now some 20 or even 30 years ago.

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.

Picasso, for example, had a supreme confidence in his ability. He was also quite content to remain a child at heart. I am not making value judgments, for each individual has his own purposes, and his unique abilities are so intimately connected with his own characteristics that it makes no sense to make that kind of comparison—but Picasso, for example, was an alien to profound thought.

When you hassle your abilities, when you compare what you think of as your drive unfavorably with what you think of as the superior drive of others, you are denying the integrity of your own natural individuality, and robbing your abilities of your own blessings.

You are still learning. Your work is still developing. How truly unfortunate you would be (louder) if that were not the case. There is always a kind of artistic dissatisfaction that any artist feels, any true artist, with work that is completed—for the true artist is always aware of the difference between the sensed ideal and its created actualization—but that is the dimension in which the artist has his being (intently). That is the atmosphere in which his mental and physical work is done, for he always feels the tug and pull, and the tension, between the sensed ideal and its manifestation.

So in a certain fashion the artist is “looking for a creative solution to a sensed but never clearly stated problem or challenge, and that involves him in artistic adventure. It is an adventure that is literally unending—and it must be one that has no clearly stated destination, in usual terms (intently). In the most basic of ways, the artist cannot say where he is going, for if he knows ahead of time he is not creating but copying, or following a series of prescribed steps like a mathematician.

The true artist is involved with the inner workings of himself with the universe—a choice, I remind you, that he or she has made, and so often the artist does indeed forsake the recognized roads of recognition, and more, seeing that, he often does not know how to assess his own progress, since his journey has no recognizable creative destination.

(10:05.) The natural man has a body. When you assail yourself for how you think you have handled or not handled your natural artistic abilities, then you are assailing the natural man. When you assail yourself you are assailing the natural man. You are disapproving of your natural characteristics, as if an animal took a dislike or dissatisfaction to its own color. You become annoyed by the spontaneous, natural tension that is a part of your artistic being—and that tension becomes physically translated in the body.

You always fall into more difficulties otherwise. By its nature art basically is meant to put each artist of whatever kind into harmony with the universe for the artist draws upon the same creative energy from which birth emerges. When you trust your abilities you allow them, through their expression, to find their own creative reconciliation, for the creative product is indeed a reconciliation between the sensed ideal and the world’s actuality.