“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your knowledge of form now can work for you automatically, serving to give structure to those ideas which will come to you freely and clearly. Your own (in quotes) “psychic abilities” now give you easy (underlined) access to inspiration. You must forget the idea as you have it, that your painting must serve to work out problems. In that framework you set problems.

Forget the idea of man’s work and what your paintings should (underlined) provide, and the idea of fame or success. Let yourself go with the joy of painting what you want to; but forgetting also, again, the idea that your paintings are working out problems, technical or not.

Now. Regardless of what you think, pure inspiration has nothing to do with time. Each artist has other overall concepts to work with besides those regarding his art.

Your own great problem, the inhibition of emotion, fits in with your own designs as well as his did. He was not ever satisfied with his work and had far less satisfaction in general from his fellow beings than you have.

His “success” (in quotes) was no success to him. The illumination that makes great paintings, again, has nothing to do with time. A man may work for nearly a century and not attain it, or it may come tomorrow afternoon.

You also wanted your work to show and express those mysterious moments when the rivers begin to flow (underlined), the heart learns to speak. The rain begins to form. You wanted to express in painting then the freeing of emotions—that could not be expressed unless first there had been repression, and those energies in full blossom that have nothing to do with age.

You place too great a burden upon yourself when you consider your ability something that must (underlined) be used. It flows through you naturally. Many spontaneous ideas for paintings and sketches you automatically reject because of several reasons. They do not fit in with your ideas of work (underlined), or with your idea of what you think you ought (underlined) to do, or because you are being too ponderous, and hence shove away many spontaneously playful ideas.

Now give us a moment. You must recapture the feeling of painting for fun. The play of the gods: your natural expression. Instead you project ponderous ideas of success or failure, consider work as a series of problems to be solved, and forget the idea of spontaneously creating.

Let the image in your mind flow imaginatively onto the board. You often think so in terms of the problems to be worked out that you concentrate upon those, in your terms. Do one of two things if there are distractions. Admit them and quite freely allow them to go into the painting freely, or firmly tell yourself that you will not allow them to divert you. But take one stand or the other.

Your own giving is flowing into your work. Let your work have its way. Do not insist it be such and such. Allow it its flow; and now I bid you a fond good evening.

(11:22. The portrait discussed above is one I recently finished after many attempts. I nearly discarded it several times, and even now realize its shortcomings. I “saved it”, and learned from it, but it of course bears the scars of the struggle. It’s serving as the basis for new work and ideas also. The long-haired man facing the viewer’s left.