“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.