“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Too many compromises do sap your strength and energy, and the work compromise was inhibiting your painting to some extent. The focus upon compromise automatically forces you to withhold directness and energy in all of your pursuits. After a while despite yourself you take on to some extent the coloration and attitudes of others who live by compromise entirely, until your own clear-cut ideas and purposes seem more and more unrealistic.

Yesterday he allowed some of these feelings to arise only because he was so miserable. (While we were in Sayre; Jane was doing the washing; mother was cooking dinner, etc.) He remembered you and the pendulum, and having none there instead allowed submerged feelings up. You should know what they were. (Jane told me about some of them at the time; which I thought an advancement.) He was scandalized and outraged. Sundays were the days he could not escape his mother. There was no school, no excuses to get out. It was a day of encounters with her—her two-hour bath, the preparation of meals, and the wild hope that he could escape after supper for a few hours.

Allowed their mobility, feelings are beneficial. They replace each other, they ebb and flow. (Louder, humorously, reaching forward to tap me on the foot:) Now do you want any more personal material?

I of course will also be present, and perhaps vocally as well. (Humorously.) But there are some interchanges that I would like you to become aware of, that can be done in practice. Then I would like to explain them to you. Do you follow me?

Other developments have been mentioned. I expect that you will play some strong part here on your own, if you want to; this having to do with the reception of Sumari art. (I am more than willing, etc.)

The art and the symbols are closely related, and I do not mean by this that the art is necessarily stylized, as for example the symbols necessarily were. But none of this could have been done, or begun, without clearing the debris that had gathered about you both, emotionally and practically. If you go ahead with the work you are meant to do, it will also take care of you.

(Smile, emphatically:) I am not concerned, because I know the energy available to you, but I do have his concern to deal with.

There are several things you do not understand. I have not explained them. (Pause.) It could be Pinet (spelled). Also add a date: 1660. Now. There are a series of steps of stone, leading to a large building. Inside sculptors are working. Leo (my phonetic interpretation) is not there. There is a man vastly interested in the idea of coloring sculptures—the statues.

The pigment however is hard to prepare. The sculptors do not trust him. Some of the ingredients come from the hillsides—scooped earth. Some from herbs. The colors must be prepared differently than for frescos.

I do. He travels and learns. He also learns some secrets of color through the man mentioned earlier, and there is a binding agent in his work not recognized as such. A chemical technique learned.

(The Rembrandt data is surprising, and raises many questions. According to Seth I lived in Denmark in the 1600’s. I was a painter as a younger man, then gave it up for the more respectable role of a farmer, at which I was quite successful. I do not know whether I traveled to Italy, or at what point in my life age-wise. Perhaps I was there before giving up active painting. I believe I farmed in Denmark, but there is much here that we don’t know. Denmark and Holland of course are close geographically.

(There is little available on Rembrandt’s correspondence—a few letters; inventories attached to his bankruptcy in later life, etc. Italy is not mentioned as far as I know. Rembrandt did do business with a wealthy art collector in Sicily, selling him some very famous works—Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, etc., and a series of etchings late in life. Don Ruffo. Historians generally say, for want of any other facts, that these business transactions were done by mail, etc.