“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

People are propelled to act in highly individual ways: what makes one man go forward can make another go backward. As a general rule the production of any kind of art is a private one initially. That art may add to the richness of society, to culture—but art always possesses its own secretive inner nature, and with that nature each artist of whatever kind must always relate.

At its very basis, regardless of all tales to the contrary, art is indeed love’s production. Ruburt writes because he loves to write—the activity of itself is intriguing, again, it is a method of discovery and accomplishment, of celebration. It is natural for him to be inspired.

There are manuals that are written primarily (underlined) as textbooks or as guides to help others, in which there is no attempt made to create an art, but to state a case. In a way these are the result of two different kinds of value systems: art for its own sake, produced out of love, or texts produced primarily for the benefit and instruction of others. In the second case the value is first of all to help others by stating as clearly as possible known facts about particular subject matters such as health or what have you.

Ruburt is involved with the production of art. It subverts art’s nature to some extent when it is asked to serve another master, however beneficial that master may seem to be—for art by its nature will always come up with surprises, and deals not so much with specifics or with directions as with overall patterns that must always be free to fall in fresh and unexplored directions.

If you are overconcerned with helping others, then you must first of all begin to question whether or not your creative material, still forming, will serve that purpose, and if not, or if there is a question, you give birth to hesitations and doubts that—again—subvert art’s free flow. An overhanded sense of responsibility leads in the same direction.

(Pause at 10:08.) So true art must in a vital fashion be divorced from utility, or from its function outside of itself, or you will end up with something else entirely. Left alone, Ruburt’s creative life falls into inspirational patterns that spring from their own secretive sources. If the “products” help people, that help is an additional feature flowing naturally from the art itself, and not applied to it with a heavy hand.

When that flow is relatively unimpeded then he is naturally attracted to subjective activity and to performance in the natural world as well. He enjoys seeing people then. To enjoy seeing people is a different thing than expecting yourself to be a public personality, however. Ruburt has been trying out a system of values that is not naturally his own. He has told himself that his art must be used to help people primarily—as if that had been his main goal all along. Art then becomes a method of doing something else—and that idea runs directly contrary to the basic integrity of art, and to art as he truly understands it to be. He therefore often felt forced to do what before he had done because he wanted to.

(10:28.) He is proud of that translation of private creative experience into the artistic public act of publication. He is not a performer, however, in the same way that an actor is, whose art requires for its best execution the lively responsive immediately present audience. He did not want to be a public personality of that kind.

His body is relaxing because it needs to, and he is finally allowing it. He was able to see the quality of his poetry today for his book. The poetry adds to the world simply by its being. Art is not meant to be a prescription. It is a celebration. People who celebrate do not need prescriptions.