“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dimly, through what you would call a history, hardly remembered, there was such a state. It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not known.

This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught. This is the agony from which creativity originally was drawn, and its reflection is still seen.

Yet the agony itself was used as a means, and the agony itself served as an impetus, strong enough finally so that All That Is initiated within itself the means to be.

All That Is therefore knows the agony of what you would call not being.

This first state of agonized search for expression may have represented the birth throes of All That Is as we know it. There existed, and clearly, the possibilities of creation as we know it, but the means were not known. Pretend then that you possessed within yourself the knowledge, the sight, of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they throbbed and pulsed as realities within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve it; that there was neither rock, nor pigment, nor source of any of these, and you ached with the yearning to produce them—and this, on an infinitesimally small scale, will perhaps give you, as an artist, some idea of the agony and the impetus that was felt.

And each self is endowed with the agony and the impetus, for it is a fabric from which All That Is made itself, and all that you know. Perhaps now you can understand why it is so difficult to try to explain matters to you in terms that you can understand.

It, of itself and from that state, has given life to infinities of possibilities. From its agony it found the way to burst forth in freedom, through expression, and in doing so gave existence to individualized consciousness that forever continues the process. Therefore it is rightly jubilant.