“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper this evening Jane read some notes I’d written recently, in which I speculated about why I paint portraits — my “heads,” as I call them — out of my “imagination,” instead of using live models of “real people.” I’ve often wondered if at least some of my motivations for working this way have reincarnational or counterpart¹ inspirations. I remarked tonight that it would be nice if Seth would discuss the subject, and Jane replied that she thought he’d do so.

(We’re presenting his material for me because it has good general application: If Seth deals with my own painted images without even mentioning the words reincarnation or counterparts, still he does reveal how such “residents of the mind” make up part of each person’s innate knowledge of his or her own greater — or larger — self.

(9:15.) Your [painted] faces represent such a recognition. You always thought (underlined twice) that your artistic talent should be enough. You thought (underlined twice) that it should be your consuming passion, but you never felt that it was — for if it was you would have followed it undeviatingly. (Long pause.) For you, painting had to be wedded to a deeper kind of understanding. Painting was even to be a teacher, leading you through and beyond images, and back to them again.

Your painting was meant to bring out from the recesses of your being the accumulation of your knowledge in the form of images — not of people you might meet now on the street, but portraits of the residents of the mind. The residents of the mind are very real. In a certain fashion, they are your parents more than your parents were, and when you express their realities, they are also expressing yours. All time is simultaneous. Only the illusion of time on each of your parts keeps you from greeting each other. To some extent, when you paint such portraits you are forming psychic bridges between yourself and those other selves: Your own identity as yourself grows.

Only in a manner of speaking (repeated twice), there are certain — (humorously:) a necessary qualifying word — “power selves,” or personalities; parts of your greater identity who utilized fairly extraordinary amounts of energy in very constructive ways. That energy is also a part of your personality — and as you paint such images you will undoubtedly feel some considerable bursts of ambition, and even exuberance. The feelings will allow you to identify the images of such personalities.

That is why I mentioned it. I knew you did not tell Ruburt. The paint brush can indeed be a key to other worlds, or course. Your own emotional feelings carry over in such paintings.

(9:29.) Give us a moment… By all means encourage the dream activity, and there will be a correspondence between your dreams, your painting and your writing.² Each one encourages the others. Your writing gains vitality from your painting, your painting from your writing — and the dreaming self at one time or another is in contact with all other Aspects — capital “A” — of your reality.

2. Seth mentioned a “correspondence” among my dreams, painting, and writing because just lately I’ve been doing small oil paintings of a few of my more vivid dream images. I’ve discovered that this is great fun — and much more challenging than I’d anticipated, as I try to reduce the shifting, brilliant dream elements to the motionless painted surfaces we’re so used to in waking reality. Each little painting becomes a unique adventure both technically and emotionally, and I hardly succeed in solving every attempt I make. Now, futilely, I wonder why I didn’t try painting images from my dreams at a much earlier age; and why one so seldom hears about other artists doing the same thing. I don’t personally know any other artist working with dreams this way.