“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.