“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A very simple analogy will arise as an artist attempts faithfully to reproduce a landscape. The attempt is obviously doomed to failure, since the necessary actual perspectives in which the landscape exists are denied to him as working materials. He cannot create an actual reproduction of a living landscape.

Such a landscape would have to take up as much physical space as the original. But more, it would have to take up an identical amount of physical time, in terms of past physical existence, which is clearly impossible.

Such a landscape would have to be composed of the actual elements that compose the original landscape. The artist would have to assemble mountains of rocks, an infinity, that is infinity of molecules, all equally impossible. The best he can do is create a distortion of the original landscape—a creation of an approximation that can comfortably exist within the limited perspectives with which he can work, and using the materials that are at his own command.

The painting that results is a new reality, but it is also a distortion of the original landscape. The artist may hint at time within his painting, but he cannot capture the physical eons that might be contained in the mountains themselves, which he wishes to reproduce.

However his painting contains new realities, and distinctive ones, that would be alien to the original landscape. The actual trees, had he really been able to reproduce them, would then undergo their seasonal changes. The trees in his painting, being artificial reproductions, do not undergo the same physical changes, even while the atoms and molecules that compose the canvas itself, and all the pigments, constantly themselves change.

(Break at 10:07. Jane was well dissociated. She had spoken at a faster rate. She also said that as she spoke she had received the feeling of a concept from Seth. It was difficult for her to put into words. It had something to do with her perception of two identical masses of landscape, one being meant to duplicate the other. At the same time, she said, the duplicating mass would have to displace another equal mass to make room for the duplication.

Now. Compare a thought, an original thought, with our original landscape. The problem would be then the same problem with which our artist was concerned.

Say for example that our individual “A” wanted to transmit this thought to “B”. The thought is as much a reality as the landscape. It is as much a part of individual “A” as the landscape is part of the physical earth. Our imaginary artist could not rip the landscape out of the earth, or bring it to his studio. He could not create an identical landscape because he did not have at his command the perspectives or materials necessary.