“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

(9:40.) Those mythological images and their belief system were shared by all—peasants and the wealthy—to a large degree. They were, then, highly charged emotionally. Whether an artist painted saints or apostles as heroic figures, as ideas embodied in flesh, or as natural men, he commented on the relationship between the natural and the divine.

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example! He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also. The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive. If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him.

(9:57.) His notebooks, for example, dealt with minute observations made upon aspects of nature itself. He combined the forces of highly original, strong imagination with very calculated preciseness, a kind of preciseness that would lead to detailed sketches of flowers, trees, the action of water—all of nature’s phenomena.

Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an entirely different fashion, divorced to some extent from its beginnings—in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world. In your world, technology is your art. It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe.

All of this involved the triggering of innate abilities at certain points in time by the species at large, and on the parts of certain individuals, as their purposes and those of the species merged.

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.