“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The variations are indeed so artistically contrived, and so minutely constructed, as to escape your perception. I will have more to say in that regard, and also about your question concerning the gull, but for now I want to make certain specific connections.

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.

(9:23.)In a way, now, the artist’s hand can be wiser than his questioning mind, certainly, if that mind learns to use its intellect in too obtrusive a fashion. We will return to this shortly, and skip to a conversation of last evening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now the mathematician may possibly expect a better-paying job. If he is brilliant he may receive the acclaim of his fellows, but the artist, whether or not he finds acclaim, must still always be face to face with that creative challenge. And if he is acclaimed for work that he knows is beneath his abilities, he will find no pleasure in the acclaim.

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.

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.

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.

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.