“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are still learning. Your work is still developing. How truly unfortunate you would be (louder) if that were not the case. There is always a kind of artistic dissatisfaction that any artist feels, any true artist, with work that is completed—for the true artist is always aware of the difference between the sensed ideal and its created actualization—but that is the dimension in which the artist has his being (intently). That is the atmosphere in which his mental and physical work is done, for he always feels the tug and pull, and the tension, between the sensed ideal and its manifestation.

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.

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.

(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.