“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your terms and in your probability, your parents’ lives are over, completed, and when in your reality you paint a picture it is finished, completed; and yet even in that context it outlives your completion of it, and endures. Surely lives are as important as paintings, and as such multidimensional creations far outlast the paintings that are representations of the life you know.

When you have completed a life then it is as if you have finished a living portrait of yourself, using the mediums of space and time. Then you have the painting to examine. The memories and realities within that portrait are yours to learn from and to use as a model for other such living portraits in time and space.

You still do not really understand. This does not apply to the two of you alone, but to your world at large: you make your own reality through your beliefs. You want to keep your beliefs yet change your reality—I am not referring to you personally here now—but this is impossible.

You can be alone in the silence, fairly isolated, and yet filled with conflict if it is within you. You can be surrounded by some noise (as Seth, Jane pointed to the ceiling; someone was moving into the apartment above us) or traffic, and feel its great synthesis with the vitality of life, and it can be conducive to peace. This does not mean that silence at times is not preferable to noise. It means that you make your own reality.

It means that the belief in discordant conditions initiates it. I am not saying that others are not involved, but that discordant thoughts bring about discordant reactions in others, to which they will react according to their own beliefs. But no one creates your private reality but you.

When you consistently concentrate upon negative aspects you seek them out from your experience and all the available stimuli, until reality certainly does seem to justify your attitudes. Using the power point of the present, you seek backward into the past, reorganizing data to those ends, and project them into the future. You feel closed in. Depression sets in. If this is the kind of painting you want then at least be aware of it. If it is not, realize that you can at any point in the present begin to alter it and your experience.