“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That center is like a road that you can follow inward. Remembered faces of those you have known, and remembered scenes from other existences, form the nucleus of your experience; the forms that you bring, seemingly out of nothing, into actuality. Although you are not consciously aware of the past familiarity, nevertheless you use the knowledge to your conscious advantage.

Your painting itself will seem to expand, for the channels will be opened. The symbols that you work with will grow in depth and validity, for they will be symbols that will be recalled to some degree by all men. There may be a definite memory recall, a few curious moments when time dissolves, when even beneath a portrait you have painted you will see another face.

Now when you, with your love of images, look at a face, relax for a moment. Slightly let yourself fall out of focus, look away, and then back to the face of the subject. Tell yourself that you will see the features and the structures shift. You will see the face behind that face, the image of the person as it was in a past life.

(Smile.) You need not paint one neck with ten heads, but the one portrait can be made to suggest previous structures and characteristics that have merged to produce the present head. You can look through the face therefore, as an archaeologist would look through rock. Such a portrait will immediately be fascinating, particularly of course to the subject, who will intuitively and unconsciously recognize its components.

A too-rigid rendition can frighten the subject by imprisoning him within the moment, from which it seems he cannot escape. Obviously the technique can be as realistic as you like, however. It is that the lines, seeming so realistic, also symbolically suggest what the viewer himself cannot see in his own face, but knows is there. And so the landscape, not one but many landscapes in one, for while it is unique in a given moment, still it is a composite in your terms of the pasts that have formed it, and the futures that act upon it even now.