“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: The spider spins his web, and the spider’s web is a combination of art, craft, esthetics, and utility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each such vision is unique, so there are no real guidebooks, and each artist chooses the ways in which life and art will interrelate, so to speak. The process is natural, and it happens spontaneously when you allow it to.

While some art does indeed require a good amount of experience in time, the source of that art is itself timeless. You cannot put specifications upon it, saying “By the age of so-and-so my art should be thus-and-so,” for there is not that kind of correlation. When there seems to be, many other factors are also at work.

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.

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.