“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After lunch today Jane and I were visited by our old friend David Yoder, who’s been in Florida recuperating from the heart bypass surgery he underwent early this year.¹ David brought news that was at first startling, then quickly developed into several conflicting emotions and ideas for us: He’d just learned from a relative of hers that a few weeks ago Mrs. Steffans [not her real name], the wife of the couple we’d purchased the hill house from in March 1975, had committed suicide at her home in a Western state while her husband was away on a business trip.

(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.

The species uses those conditions, however, so that the paintings of the great masters can serve as models and impetuses, not simply for the extraordinary artwork involved, but to rearouse within man those emotions that brought the paintings into being.