“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Artists use perspective on a flat surface to try to capture there the feelings and experiences of depth that are, in themselves, alien to the flat canvas, or paper or board. The artist may vividly evoke the image of a disappearing road that appears to be broad in the picture’s foreground, only to turn smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish in some distant hidden point. No physical person will walk that road, however. An ant crawling upon such a canvas would hasten across just another flat surface, and be quite unaware of the inviting avenue and any painted fields or mountains.

Now in the dream state, you suddenly become aware on occasion of greater perspective. This perspective cannot “work” at your usual level of consciousness, any more than the artist’s perspective will work for the ant’s — though there is much you could learn from an ant’s consciousness (intently). Say that I smiled.

(10:07.) Your own waking consciousness deals specifically with certain kinds of distinctions. These help form the very structure of physical existence. They highlight your lives, providing them also with a kind of frame. Quite simply, you want to experience a certain kind of reality, so you put boundaries about events, that allow you to concentrate upon them. When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination. He or she chooses one area of concentration. Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well. So the psyche holds equally lives in progress, lived or not yet lived, and deals with a greater perspective from which your ordinary perspective emerges.