“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.

(Yesterday evening we were visited by Dr. John Beahrs and his bride, Claudette. The visit was quite enjoyable, and it marked the first time in days that I’d forgotten my aches and pains, as I realized when it was all over. I slept well—and the discomfort returned full force when I got up this morning. I was so bothered, in fact, that I had great difficulty concentrating on painting.

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.

Many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: The bee’s nest, for example, the beaver’s dam—and there are endless other examples. This is not “blind instinctive behavior” at all, but the result of well-ordered spontaneous artistry. It is foolish to say that the spider’s web is less a work of art because the web can be formed in no other way by a spider, since for one thing the differences in the individual webs are not obvious to you, only to the spiders.

Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man likes to believe that this is so, and no scientist is going to grant a spider or a bee any sense of esthetic appreciation, certainly, so what you have is art in its human manifestations, and art is above all a natural characteristic.

Those ideas have been in your mind for some time, and they automatically throw a damper on your creative spontaneity. There are all different kinds of artistic development, of course, some more than others directly concerned with the play of life itself upon the artistic capacity, so that generally speaking, now, there are certain kinds of developments that in your world require the personality’s encounter with years of experience. That experience becomes art’s sometimes invisible ingredient.

We are back to self-disapproval, of course, but I want you to understand that while self-disapproval is a problem for most people in your society, it is a problem for the artist particularly, because it is the artist who must trust himself or herself most of all, and it is the artist who must often have no other approval to count upon.