“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Painting is really unalloyed fun for Jane. Not that she doesn’t have her failures, but her work has greatly improved since we met in 1954, and in ways that I hadn’t foreseen for her. Indeed, I now think that my wife is a better painter in her way than I am in mine. This doesn’t mean that I’m knocking my own abilities in any way. Jane is freer. She works in oils, acrylics, and watercolors. When painting she knows a release from time, care, and responsibility that she doesn’t experience otherwise—and surely that pleasure emphasizes qualities of living that Seth has always stressed. Her painting is her unhampered creative translation of the Seth material into pigments instead of words. Because of her defective vision Jane sees perspective differently than I do, yet achieves her own kind of depth with her “instinctive” designs and color choices. Her art contains a charming, innocent, mystical freedom that I envy. She’s produced many more paintings than I have in my own more conventional, more plodding way [although now I’m working faster than I used to]. I think that any assessment of her writing and psychic abilities will have to include a close study of her painting. To me, the lessening of Jane’s physical mobility has resulted in a strong compensating growth in her painting mobility. I also think her painting reflects her free physical motion in her dreams. Hardly accidental, any of that. I’ve seen her turn almost automatically to the relief that only painting can give her.

“I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the ‘creative self to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain—the tragic flaw—[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite those feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.”

As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threatened but retain its prominence—for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended.

Religion was hampered—and is—by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. (Long pause.) Reincarnation suggests, of course, the extension of personal existence beyond one time period, independently of one bodily form, the translation or transmission of intelligence through nonphysical frameworks, and implies psychological behavior, memory and desire as purposeful action without the substance of any physical mechanism—propositions that science at its present stage of development simply could not buy, and for which it could find no evidence, for its methods would automatically preclude the type of experience that such evidence would require.

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

“We have to go beyond that—back to stressing the creative larger-than-life aspects. Otherwise all we have is a better problem-solving framework…. I’ve rejected all that kind of hash projected onto Seth’s books by others or myself—the assumptions that Seth must prove himself as a problem-solver—or the importance of functionalism over art. The larger view is that art, by being itself, is bigger than life while springing from it; that Seth’s and my books go beyond that simply by being themselves. They automatically put people in a different, vaster psychological space, another frame of reference, in which a good number of problems vanish or simply do not apply….