“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I was curious as to how often such a “negative psychology” operated—when, simply because of his or her own hang-ups, an individual [or more than one person] is attracted to a site where strongly negative events had taken place. Surely this happens just as often as it does with positive situations. Later this afternoon Jane said she didn’t think she’d ever tuned into Mrs. Steffans’s depressions in that manner: “If I thought I had, or still was,” she said, “I’d move out.” We’d have to. I have no feeling that I’d been affected, either. Still, we found it strange indeed—unreal, even—to consider that a person so intimately connected with a place we love had killed herself.³

(With many pauses to start:) Dictation. Your established fields of knowledge do not grant any subjective reality to c-e-l-l-s (spelled).

Cells, however, possess an inner knowledge of their own shapes, and of any other shapes in their immediate environment—this apart from the communication system mentioned earlier that operates on biological levels between all cells.

To some important degree, cells possess curiosity, an impetus toward action, a sense of their own balance, and a sense of being individual while being, for example, a part of a tissue or an organ. The cell’s identification biologically is highly connected with this [very] precise knowledge of its own shape, or sometimes shapes. Cells, then, know their own forms.

In highly complicated cellular structures like yourselves (pause), with your unique mental properties, you end up with a vital inborn sense of shape and form. The ability to draw is a natural outgrowth of this sensing of shape, this curiosity of form. On a quite unconscious level you possess a biological self-image that is quite different from the self that you see in a mirror. It is a knowledge of bodily form from the inside out, so to speak, composed of cellular shapes and organizations, operating at the maximum. The simple cell, again, has a curiosity about its environment, and on your much more advanced cellular level your own curiosity is unbounded. It is primarily felt as a curiosity about shapes: the urge to touch, to explore, to feel edges and smooth places.

(9:19.) Remember that cells have consciousness, so while I say these leanings are biologically entwined, they are also mental properties. Drawing in its simplest form is, again, an extension of those inclinations, and in a fashion serves two purposes. Particularly on the part of children, it allows them to express forms and shapes that they see mentally first of all. When they draw circles or squares, they are trying to reproduce those inner shapes, transposing those images outward into the environment—a creative act, highly significant, for it gives children experience in translating inner perceived events of a personal nature into a shared physical reality apparent to all.

The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such a capacity to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes. The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo (1475–1564) could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements. You are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days images outside of those provided by nature’s objects were highly rare.

People could physically only see what was presently before their eyes—no postcards with pictures of the Alps, or far places. Visual data consisted of what the eye could see—and that was indeed a different kind of a world, a world in which a sketched object was of considerable value. Portraits [were] possessed only by the priests and nobility. You must remember also that the art of the great masters was largely unknown to the poor peasants of Europe, much less to the world at large. Art was for those who could enjoy it—who could afford it. There were no prints to be passed around,⁴ so art, politics, and religion were all connected. Poor people saw lesser versions of religious paintings in their own simple churches, done by local artists of far lesser merit than those [who] painted for the popes.

This was an entirely different kind of art than you have now. It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system. Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework. That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found elsewhere, brought art into that great flowering.

2. For a brief description of Jane’s encounter with Mrs. Steffans, see Note 13 for Session 744, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Seth, and Jane and I, described a number of our house-hunting adventures in the two volumes of that work. Those complicated, interrelated happenings are just as fascinating to us now as they were when they were unfolding; we have yet to publish their full story. We think that the events surrounding our purchase of the hill house furnish many clues to the spontaneous and creative workings of individual consciousnesses in our chosen physical reality.

Woodcuts and wood blocks were used for a variety of purposes by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, for example, and even by the Romans. Many of the early prints created in Europe illustrate religious subjects. One of the first dated European woodcuts, showing a religious figure, appeared in 1423; a book bearing woodcut illustrations was produced circa 1460; the first Roman book containing woodcuts was made in 1467. Bibles were illustrated with woodcuts in the late 15th century. The earliest known engravings, printed on paper, date from around 1450; pictorial engraving and etching were evidently developed in Germany in the early 1500s. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) experimented with his own method of copper engraving. But all of these efforts were beginnings: There couldn’t have been any mass circulation of printed material in those days.