“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.

(Yesterday evening we were visited by Dr. John Beahrs and his bride, Claudette. The visit was quite enjoyable, and it marked the first time in days that I’d forgotten my aches and pains, as I realized when it was all over. I slept well—and the discomfort returned full force when I got up this morning. I was so bothered, in fact, that I had great difficulty concentrating on painting.

(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 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.

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.

While some art does indeed require a good amount of experience in time, the source of that art is itself timeless. You cannot put specifications upon it, saying “By the age of so-and-so my art should be thus-and-so,” for there is not that kind of correlation. When there seems to be, many other factors are also at work.

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.

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.

Simply a suggestion, since you have been so concerned at times with that young man’s abilities. End of session.

(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.