“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane began speaking for Seth in her usual manner; voice on the quiet side, a few pauses, eyes open often, etc.)

Now give us a moment. (Pause.)

(Long pause.) You deal with emotion and creativity, and have always done so. Your own ability as a draftsman, if the term is the correct one—your technical ability—was adopted for two reasons.

(Pause.) Now, a moment. (Pause.)

In the beginning you could not have painted if you had not allowed yourself to develop this technique, which allowed you to use emotion and yet contain it. (Long pause.) These elements helped form and define your abilities, adding to their particular and peculiar nature.

The technique can follow beautifully through as a handmaiden of the intuitions. The technique can be channels of line through which feeling may flow. (Long pause.) Let the medium and technique follow naturally from the original vision. Allow the vision then to take its own form. But do not impose (underlined)a form upon it. Then this fine technique will be truly used to advantage.

Give us a moment. (Pause.) Your feeling toward oil—you like it because you consider it basic and powerful; and for the same reason you have also not wanted to use it, resenting its personal connotations to you of raw emotion.

Working with subjects that initiate joy within you will also help free you, though you are to some extent frightened even of joy, distrusting it. Still you will experience freedom when you deal with subjects that are evocative to you, of the joy of life or abundance of nature. (Pause.)

Now in portrait work, looking at a subject easily for example, try to see him as he was in past lives. This will add depth and dimension and vastly increase your own interest. Now form is extremely important, but forms change constantly, and no form is permanent. Therefore let your fine draftsman’s ability carry in itself that message: beautiful form but already in transition, with the vision beneath ever ready to adopt new shape. (Long pause. I consider this to be excellent and perceptive material.)

Think first in terms of being yourself a medium, through which visions flow. They will each to some degree suggest their own forms which you can faithfully follow. Do not try consciously to settle upon any given medium, oil, et cetera (pause), or consciously try to set up a lifetime program, in those terms, now.

The vision will take another form, but if you have faithfully followed through, then the vision and its adopted form become one moment point. (Pause.) Allow the vision to express itself in form; again, do not attempt to impose the form upon the vision. The form should grow out of the vision.

A rather random activity in this case. Initiated in part (pause) by your parents’ situation, and in pure annoyance at the dilemma we have been discussing. (Pause, eyes closed.) Give us time.

This is realism. Realism is more than the surface of things. (A pause longer than one minute, eyes closed.)

(Pause.) Stop thinking in terms of the medium, then, and let each vision suggest its own. I will give you additional material on this subject when you want it.