“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night in ESP class, Jane tried to contact a newly dead friend of some class members. She said she felt she had achieved an emotional rapport or contact with the “person,” whom she had never met.)

(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.

It was a tool of your art. It was also a part of your talent. It added to the dimension of your work, but to some degree it was also adopted as a protective mechanism, to give you some feeling of separation. Your mother’s emotionalism frightened you so that you distrusted strong feeling, even while you must use it, and be vividly aware of it in order to paint.

It allowed you to feel that you were capturing the subject, and to assure yourself that the subject was not capturing you. You wanted to be sure that you were using your emotions or feelings and not that they were using you.

The emotionalism within the household seemed to be threatening, and in a free form. You never knew when it would erupt, and as a child you felt helpless before it. Through precise renderings you felt that you imprisoned it, and therefore controlled it. In the beginning this had quite magical connotations for you. Basically you have felt this magical commitment to realistic work, for to leave it would be to break the lines of this imprisonment, letting loose the emotions that you feared.

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.

At times you have been afraid of putting too much of yourself in your work, as if the painting then could imprison you. In the back of your mind you thought of your mother and father, imprisoned in their house. The house an emotional framework, but quite physical.

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.

You did not consider it refined, in terms of process, enough. Neither did you find yourself at home however with the acrylics, that you felt were over-refined, and too far away from basics. Your problem being your overall attitude toward the emotion from which your art springs, for your attitude is then projected outward upon your mediums. To some extent the present dilemma was initiated by your parents’ condition.

There is a feeling that emotion is formlessness.