“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(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.