“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Once more, as I’ve done often in recent years, I expressed the hope to myself that in another probable reality very similar to this one I opted for the outdoor life in a much stronger way—even to living outside night and day for most of the year. I must be doing so right now! In that probable life I use a tent sometimes, but I cook and sleep outside as much as possible, except in the worst weather. What a different life! I’m still a painter, I often think, but perhaps not a writer. I might be a Milton Avery or a Paul Cézanne type of artist. More and more I’ve come to admire—revere, even—the single-minded, childlike devotion artists like Avery and Cézanne had for their art. Not that I want to copy Cézanne, for instance [I couldn’t even if I wanted to], but in that other reality I too chose to live the natural life in a more naive or clear-eyed manner—to sublimate myself before nature while at the same time trying to become master of whatever means of expression I can achieve.

How strange a desire to have in these days of scientific and religious turmoil, of computers and nuclear debate and space technology. It’s almost like trying to wish oneself back into an earlier, seemingly less complicated time. That, surely, would be an illusory goal! But no matter what we may accomplish as a species, or how far we may travel, in those terms we started out utterly dependent upon our earth, with its fantastic variety of resources and life forms. That sublime framework still exists for us in all of its great beauty, and I want to always return to it: We create our human version of it each day, and I think that even now we’ve hardly begun to understand what we are and have. I’ve come to believe that the predominantly outdoor life would give me a certain understanding of our temporal and spiritual worlds impossible to grasp otherwise, and that my painting would inevitably mirror that greater comprehension. Sometimes I simply yearn for that way of living. Of course, what I’m really stressing here is living the independent life as much as possible within our ever-more-complicated national and world cultures. But we all have our dreams.

Even though she values the idea of independence as much as I do, the idea of such a life doesn’t appeal to Jane at all. Not that she didn’t take to camping, for instance, when I introduced her to it after we married in 1954. She grew up in a quite different physical and psychological environment, however, and the outdoor, athletic life was not a part of that ambience. But she more than proved her own intuitive grasp of nature, and of my own desires, by producing for me as a Christmas present [© 1977] her excellent book, The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation….