“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your own symptom, the hand, representing uncertainty in your work. You felt a shaky foundation. You felt that your talent was giving you but a shaky foundation or basis within economic and social realities.

The attitude itself helps cause that reality, to which you then react. When you were attempting to take your father’s place, you used your talent as your mother wanted you to. She had no use for your father’s talent of inventiveness, because he did not use it to make money.

To search for perfection within your art is good. The drive is good. But this is something different. Each painting has a spontaneous reality that you have often refused to acknowledge. (Pause.) Carried to extremes this could smother the spontaneous spark that is the heart of each painting.

Not allowing yourself to make money through paintings also allowed you to punish yourself for what you considered this act of defiance. Two purposes in the main were served. This also affected your work itself to some degree, in that you sometimes inserted qualities in the paintings to hold people off, a remoteness.

Give us a moment. (Pause. Head down.) Now hear me. Using what you have learned here tonight, you can use your ability more freely. (Pause.) You can step out, so to speak, you can allow yourself to rely upon the integrity of spontaneity as it applies to your painting and to your talent.

What you want is not a perfection which is rigid, but the ever-balancing action of spontaneous motion, a balance precariously maintained for a moment through ever-approaching and receding imbalances that result in objects.

The perfection that you seek is not ever a finished, but a becoming quality. The technical ability gives a poised point through which these realities can emerge. The technique that is yours and is excellent should be the point of departure that sends the spontaneous action into new reality, and not a rigid mold to contain it.

(“Well, what do you think of these temperas I’ve been working on then?”)

Wait. (Pause, hand raised.) I am concerned over your arbitrary idea of age and advancement in terms of what you should expect at your age. (A point I rather deliberately made during discussion at last break.) This is limiting in concept, and rather uncharacteristic of you in larger respects.