“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It’s supposed to express my views of the Seth experience, and how it has influenced or changed my ideas on art, life, and so forth. Then, as Jane told me about all of this, she announced that Seth was coming through right away — a most unusual procedure as far as our regular sessions are concerned. She took off her glasses….)

The book should cover your version of our joint experience — your own philosophical explanation of it, the questions it arouses within your own mind, your observations of Ruburt as Jane and in our trance states. Other portions should explain your own ideas concerning creativity as you feel it in yourself — the differences and similarities between your experience when you paint a picture from “usual” inspiration and when first of all you perceive the psychic impression that leads to a painting. Some illustrations from an initial sketch to a completed painting should be included.

Give some thought to experimentation, observing the nature of color in usual consciousness and in altered states. Pay attention to color in your dreams also. You should go into your own ideas about the people you paint, and why, being fascinated with portraits, you often do not use models.

(9:42. “I’m so surprised I haven’t even put my glasses back on yet,” Jane exclaimed after she’d come out of trance. Neither of us have been thinking of such a project, which isn’t to say the idea of my doing a book involving Seth, at least in part, hasn’t occurred to me occasionally.

Give us a moment… Often individuals go overboard, forgetting that ideas have their own vitality. Such people make divisions where basically there are none. They consider ideas as completely mental properties, separate from their concept of the body. They think ideas reside in their heads. Who, for example, imagines that an idea is alive in his elbow, or knee, or toe?

Generally, people believe that ideas have little to do with the living flesh. The flesh seems physical and ideas do not. Those given to love of the intellect often make an unnecessary separation between the world of concepts and that of the flesh.

While it is true that the body is the living materialization of idea, it is also true that these ideas form an active, responsive, alive body. The body is not just a tool to be used. It is not just a vehicle for the spirit. It is the spirit in flesh. You impose your ideas upon it and largely affect its health and well-being through your conscious beliefs. But the body is composed of living, responding atoms and molecules. These have their own consciousnesses alive in matter, their drive to exist and be within the framework of their own nature. They compose the cells, and these combine to form the organs. The organs possess the combined consciousnesses of each of the cells within them, and in their way the organs sense their own identity.

There is no difference between the energy that shapes your ideas and the energy that grows a flower, or that heals your finger if you burn it. The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms — some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.