“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All limitations, basically, are self-adopted. They may be necessary at one time or another, but they can never be primary realities. Limitations, in other words, are illusion. You have to deal with them only because you have created them. Your exterior circumstances are the materializations of inner climate.

Your own thoughts have a reality that you do not understand, and their own kind of form, or psychic content, and this content exists not as pure energy, but as energy with form and shape. And when it is perceived by you, then it has bulk. The bulk is the result of your own perception. The bulk, or mass, is perceived whether or not the ideas have ever been materialized as physical matter. Whenever you come in contact with a particular idea form, and this will only happen in projections, then you will automatically perceive that form with bulk or mass.

You organize yourselves out of other matter, you see. The difference is a psychic one, and not a physical one as it appears. The inner identity extends itself over larger and larger groups of energy forms, and acts as an overall psychic pattern. But all is connected.

Projection then is aggression. The self thrusts forward into new dimensions, and this is creative. Painting a picture is aggressive. You are thrusting energy into new forms. All this you see implies a destruction, but only in your limited terms. Each projection, for example, is the death, in one way, of the limited self that stood earlier.

The ego, as a rule, is frightfully leery of such action, since to it an out-of-body experience always symbolizes physical death. At the same time the ego becomes more assured after successful projections, since it discovers itself not only intact but immeasurably enriched. Indeed, the ego both fights, fears and desires any creative act. Any creative act, including the production of any art, necessitates a momentary release from the ego, an escape from it, which the ego fears.

Now, you see, when you paint a picture you use your physical body as a tool to create your inner idea. When you create physical matter you are not aware of doing so, but you affect energy directly in such an execution, your own attention being focused primarily in the physical system.

You would have so much freedom within, and no more. You would be different from the inhabitants who you might encounter there. But in one way or another your existence would be perceived.

Now. Most systems have more reality than a painting, but not all of them. The very nature of some would be frightening to you. Your paintings are a creation, and yet by their nature they are limitations. They are limitations because their reality is necessarily limited by the elements you have chosen. You paint one house within a landscape for example. This is a creation. But two houses will never appear.

No. Perhaps it could be a reference to Illinois, but that is all I see.

(Pause.) Not an invitation precisely at all, but reference to an occasion or visit. (Pause.)

(Of course the emotional involvement and reaction between us and my parents is strong, and would tend to override more specific details of the envelope object itself, once Jane had picked up the idea of my mother. Jane had the idea of Mother’s greeting card in mind from the start of the envelope data, she said. She tried not to let this color the data. She mentally dropped it, deciding to let Seth speak in his own way. But the card plays a large part in the data nevertheless.

(“A card with a cartoon.” Yes. See pages 320-21. Again, this is not the object, but the card and the object are strongly related both in emotional content and in our physical time.

(“Several events happening together, or a series of objects strung together on the object.” Probably a reference to the contents of my mother’s writing on the greeting card, since this deals with several events. The objects strung together being words. This could apply to the envelope object, but this data is sandwiched in with others applying to the greeting card.

(See the tracing of the penciled slip I had attached to the envelope object when I first obtained it, reminding me of the date. The sequence, 8/14/66, is also close to 1418. Jane had never seen this slip, but it had been attached to the object for some time and perhaps was clairvoyantly divined. She had seen the envelope containing the greeting card in a casual way, of course, as had I. I did not discover the discrepancy in ZIP codes on the envelope until examining it after the session—several days after.

(First Question: “Can you be more specific about the I L I A?” “No. Perhaps it could be a reference to Illinois, but that is all I see.” The greeting card was manufactured in Illinois, as shown in small print to the right of the logo on page 4.

(7th Question: “Can you tell me anything about what the handwriting says on the object?” “Not an invitation precisely at all, but reference to an occasion or visit.” I thought it okay to ask this question since Seth had already mentioned handwriting in connection with the data. Seth’s answer here is a good reference to the note Mother wrote inside the greeting card. It can actually apply just as well to the envelope object itself. The phone call on August 14 from my mother concerned a visit by us to Sayre, and one by her to us in Elmira. During this call arrangements were made for her to visit us here next weekend, on Saturday, August 20.

(Once again the greeting card shoulders its way into the data ahead of the actual envelope object. As explained both are related closely, but the greeting card with note, referred to above, and with an out-of-town connection, is of course not the object itself.

The one impression of which Ruburt was aware was a greeting card—quite legitimate, but it was meant only to lead him further.