“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.

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.

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.

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.