“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

(9:45. “Oh. I’m so glad I’m back on the sessions,” Jane said. “I get nervous as shit when I’m away from them—more than a week or so, I mean. But I just didn’t feel good....” I told her the session was excellent indeed. Resume at 9:50.)

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.

If you have a mathematical problem in, say, geometry, you solve it in a certain specific fashion. You add QED at the end, and you work by prescribed steps along the way. But the creative problem is never entirely even stated: it is felt or sensed. It is psychologically experienced as a state of tension. I refer to a creative tension, but one that is of course to some extent also a state of stress, creative stress.

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.

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.

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.

(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.