“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This is the first session we’ve had since March 6. I think Jane held it only because I haven’t been feeling well for several weeks. She’s only now really recovering from the cold she picked up from RW early last month; and somehow she also got off the track of the sessions.

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

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.