“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.

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.

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.

Instead he focuses his abilities into the matter at hand—easy enough, you might certainly say, for the spider, yet not so easy for the man. The fact is, of course, that in the most basic manner, now, the man—the natural man—possesses that fine, keen spontaneity and inner confidence.

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).

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.

When you hassle your abilities, when you compare what you think of as your drive unfavorably with what you think of as the superior drive of others, you are denying the integrity of your own natural individuality, and robbing your abilities of your own blessings.

(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.

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.

A note: Beside your dream images, and so forth, which are indeed an excellent idea, you have advantages here that the young man of some 20 or 30 years ago would have envied: he would have been delighted with the screened-in porches. Perfect, he would have thought, at least one of them, for a summer studio. To have a house with screened-in porches amid trees—what an advantage! He would have found a way to use them in the summertime. There would have been an interplay then between dream activity and the physical images of a unique nature.