“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I told you that dreams played an important part in what you think of (underlined) as evolution. In a way, this is an extension of last evening’s session, but the art connection is important.

Art was often used in the way you are using it now—at least to some extent in your case—as a method of defining such dream images, which were not necessarily to be found in the immediate environment at all. Some cave drawings are an example.

Art as painting or drawing was then an important element in what you think of as man’s evolution. When several different persons of a given tribe, say, dreamed of and drew similar animal images, then the people began to look for the physical materialization. Men dreamed their own maps in the same fashion, one man dreaming perhaps a certain portion, and several dreamers contributing their versions, drawing in sand in the waking state, or upon cave walls.

At its very heart, creativity of that nature is indeed both sacred and highly useful, and from that dimension of activity all of the initial patterns (underlined) for your highly technological society have come. Your society has emphasized and exaggerated the objective characteristics of life to such an extent, however, that art seems to be an esthetic, fairly remote phenomenon, quite divorced from physical time. It might delight the eye as decoration, or cover a blank spot upon the wall.

(Pause.) The Roman Catholic Church seized upon art, inserted its own strong symbolism, provided art with a recognizable religious, social, and political value. (Pause.) It became, however, a supercharged symbol itself of churchly opulence, and this applies also, for example, in the past to architecture. What good were ornate cathedrals, replete with carved angels, saints, and gargoyles, gleaming with glazed colorful windows, when the people lived in hovels and labored in the fields? So the buildings in America were to be prim and proper, undecorated, when the country was established. Even clothes began to become less colorful, as for example in the Puritan’s straight garb.

The world of art or literature, or music or learning, was closed to him. When your country began its own saga, each individual was to be considered equal, regardless of birth. Many of these same people had been denied advantages in Europe. They were upstarts. What they did was establish equal starting lines for an incredible race in which each began with an equal position and then tried to outdo the other, freed of the class distinctions that had previously hampered them. Because there were few ground rules, and because it takes time to develop a culture, this rambunctious group set out to tame the continent, to show Europe that Americans could do Europe one better, without a king and without pomp.

(10:30.) Give us a moment.... To some extent you felt you had to prove your worth as a conventional male, in—if you will forgive me—the narrowest of parochial terms, though you were possessed of abilities that were considered conventionally male only if they could be suitably laundered: art turned into commercial work, and other creative abilities, such as your writing, that at one time could have turned into several fields—the writing of Westerns, even. You felt the ordinary male accomplishments in terms of sports, which brought instant approval, yet you did not choose that road.