“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

I try to strongly state the pristine uniqueness of the individual. I also say that there are no limitations to the self. The two statements can appear to be contradictory. When you are a child, your sense of identity does not include old age in usual experience. When you are an old person, you do not identify yourself as a child. Your sense of identity, then, changes physically through the years. In a way it seems that you add on to yourself through experience, becoming “more than you were before.” You move in and out of probable selfhoods, while at the same time — usually with the greatest of ease — you maintain an identity of yourself. The mosaics of consciousness are brilliant to behold.

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.

In the next portion of this book we will discuss people who are frightened of themselves, then, and the roles that they seek in private and social behavior. To some extent we will be discussing closed environments, whether mental or physical, in which questioning becomes taboo and dangerous. Such environments may be private, as in the case of persons with what are generally called mental disorders, or they may be shared by many, in — for example — mass paranoia.

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.