“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Bill barely had time to get his coat off and take a pencil and paper I offered him so that he could take his own notes, when the session began. As usual Jane was nervous before 9 PM. She began dictating in a fairly strong voice, and somewhat more rapidly. I had the feeling she was a bit nervous because of the witness. Her pacing was rather fast, her eyes darkened as usual.

A note. The material was not distorted when Ruburt gave the April 15th date in connection with Miss Callahan, and the crisis of which I spoke. Her ego has given up the struggle. It realizes that it will not be liquidated. Moments of lucidity will flash and die away. She is basically satisfied now, realizing from direct experience of her own that death involves a transformation, and if there is an ending in your terms, then there is also a new beginning.

Obviously, to some degree he has been able to use his inner senses. However many of the fragmentary apparitions that he has seen, for he has actually seen more fragmentary apparitions than he realizes, many of these have been fragmentary through his own inability to organize the material from the inner senses.

Three lives ago, Mark was contained in a remarkably cruel and violent nature. He is now extremely kind to make up for past cruelties. In the immediately previous life he was a woman, living in your own west, midwest.

Art of any kind is extremely important as a way of paying off debts, that is psychological debts. When you were a woman, Mark, and wealthy, you gave away money. Now like Joseph and Ruburt, you give away parts of yourself, fragments of yourself, made more or less into living psychological forms that according to your ability are free from not only time, but free from many of the defects of your own present personality.

You draw upon your own entity’s hidden abilities and knowledge, and therefore transcend the limits of your own present personality. You are not only your present personality, you are the sum of all your personalities. This should be realized.

Paintings, and for Ruburt’s benefit poetry—I certainly don’t want Ruburt to feel neglected—but paintings have their own vitality and exist independently of the artist, and are the result of a spontaneous, free, impulsive burst of giving that asks no return, and as such, because no return is expected, returns are given.

There is quite a fleshy story here, in which Mark was rather directly connected. There are few of your friends and acquaintances in this life with whom you were connected to any strong degree in past lives. Some acquaintances were in your circle in various lives, and merely happened to be born in a like situation to your own because of problems that more or less corresponded to your own.

(Seth’s mention of Ed Robbins, who now lives in New Paltz, NY, struck me as rather strange. Ed and I became acquainted first by mail when we were both doing free-lance commercial art work. At the time, many years ago, we did not meet. Later, while I was living in my hometown of Sayre, PA, I received a phone call from Ed inviting me to work with him on a project in Saratoga Springs, NY. This time it was a syndicated comic strip. Indeed, Ed introduced me to Jane the day after I moved to Saratoga, where I lived for about a year in the mid-fifties. Within a year Jane and I were married. Then for some time we did not see Ed; the last time was during an overnight stopover in New Paltz, when Jane and I were on our way to York Beach, Maine, on vacation. It will be recalled that it was in the dance hall at York Beach that Jane and I saw the projected fragments of our own personalities, that Seth dealt with so extensively in the 9th session, of December 18, 1963. [See Volume One.]

Nevertheless, I will take it upon myself to point out part of the reason, which does have its own hilarious aspects, looked at from perhaps a more distant perspective than that of which Mark is now capable.

In art, you manage sometimes to put into a framework of space something which usually has no existence in space. The crucifixion has no existence in space. It has no existence basically in time, in that it did not occur to any particular person, per se, at any particular time per se. Nevertheless it is a reality on your plane, and it exists within it.

And within the framework of the crucifixion there are inexhaustible truths still to be explored. Mark’s paintings of the crucifixion, like other such paintings, created a concept form, within which an unexpressable concept is transformed into expressible terms and placed within a spatial framework.

The painting is in a room with three windows, in a large building. It was not stolen but misplaced. The reasons are many. One of the main reasons is one that has to do with Mark’s own personality and psychological makeup.

He was attracted to the painting, and subconsciously he resented giving into the impulse of giving the painting to his mother. As a subconscious punishment he allowed the painting to be lost through a series of small slips, errors and mistakes of his own, and others.

(Jane began dictating at a slow rate, in a voice pretty much her own, at 11:07.)