“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you are sketching outdoors, as a helpful exercise I suggest the following: attach your focus of attention to one small thing. It may be a flower or a stone. Something however that catches your own eye. Imagine the energy within that object perpetual, but in terms of being endlessly alive and vital.

In a portrait, do the same exercise as given earlier. Imagine the individual as the center of all life, so that when the painting is completed it automatically suggests the whole universe of which the individual is part. Nothing exists in isolation, and this is the secret that the old masters knew so well.

In itself an object should be then felt as its unique identity, and as a part of the whole universe. A stone or a flower is a very small thing. When you attach your attention say to a flower, it is not only a matter of imagining yourself as the flower, or trying to sense what a flower is. It is also to imagine the power of the energy that causes that flower to grow; and yet in a landscape you will have perhaps many flowers. They must each suggest the reality of the overall pulsating vitality that makes their appearance possible.