“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With many pauses to start:) Dictation. Your established fields of knowledge do not grant any subjective reality to c-e-l-l-s (spelled).

(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.

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.

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.

(Pause.) In a fashion the house itself yearned toward a flexibility, more openness with the elements, and the woman was attracted to it for that reason. You have not reacted to any negative influences in that regard, but in a fashion through your creativity helped reconcile what were conflicting elements.

2. For a brief description of Jane’s encounter with Mrs. Steffans, see Note 13 for Session 744, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Seth, and Jane and I, described a number of our house-hunting adventures in the two volumes of that work. Those complicated, interrelated happenings are just as fascinating to us now as they were when they were unfolding; we have yet to publish their full story. We think that the events surrounding our purchase of the hill house furnish many clues to the spontaneous and creative workings of individual consciousnesses in our chosen physical reality.