“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When children draw objects they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences—possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms. (Long pause.) The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two processes. An astute understanding of inner energy and outer energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements.

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.

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.

(10:05.) Give us a moment…. Man always does best, or his best, when he sees himself in heroic terms. While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. (Pause.) Man the sinner took over from man the child of God. As a result, one you see in art particularly, man became a heroic figure, then a natural one. (Pause.) The curiosity that had been directed toward divinity became directed toward nature. Man’s sense of inquiry led him, then, to begin to paint more natural portraits and images. He turned to landscapes also. This was an inevitable process. As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of the imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not. So his paintings became more and more realistic.

Art became wedded, then, to phenomena directly before the eyes. Therefore, in a way it could present man with no more data than he had before. Imaginative interpretations seemed like pretensions. Art largely ended up—in those terms, now—as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth. What you call abstract art tried to reverse that process, but even the abstract painters did not believe in the world of the imagination, in which there were any heroic dimensions, and the phase is largely transitory.

I did mean to mention that man’s use of perspective in painting was a turning point (early in the 15th century), in that it foreshadowed the turning of art away from its imaginative colorations toward a more specific physical rendering—that is, to a large degree after that the play of the imagination would not be allowed to “distort” the physical frame of reference.

10:28 P.M. Once she’d moved past a slow beginning, Jane had accelerated her delivery considerably. “The session’s really good,” I told her. “I want to read over the material on art especially.”

She laughed. “I hope it fits in with the book. I never heard of a book on evolution talk about dreams and art.”)