“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(My own hassles with my side, groin and scrotum are the usual ones I’ve had at times before—especially last year at this time. My painting hasn’t been going well lately, and I’ve been concerned about that. Actually I’m trying a number of different painting approaches, and think I got sidetracked into too much experimentation, so as I told Jane I’m sure painting is involved in my upsets. However, at various times the pendulum has given me all kinds of other reasons for my physical ills: taxes, money, Jane’s symptoms, success and failure—the works, one might say. I was pretty disgusted and out of sorts by this evening. Still, through it all I’ve been sleeping well and eating okay also. I don’t suppose this description adequately describes the depth of my feelings, since I’ve really been bothered for some time, to the extent that I no longer feel free physically, and once again have contemplated seeking medical help as a last resort.

(For the past week we’ve been trying a “new” treatment for Jane’s symptoms —one we read about recently, and which involves the application of cold packs to her knees and hands for starters. She’s had some encouraging results, and we plan to give the idea a good try. It’s the opposite of the usual treatment—heat—given for her kind of difficulties.

(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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

(10:20 PM. “Okay, Bob, I’m making a statement of intentions,” Jane said as soon as she was out of trance. “I’m back to the sessions. I was nervous before this one, and I’ll ready the last book session before next Monday....”