“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt has learned to make compromises, not always gracefully, but he has learned that they are sometimes important. He is against them on principle however, and very straightforward in his approach. He saw your life adding up to a circle of compromises – compromises that would cost you your vitality, both of you, in the end.

In some (underlined) respects he was right about compromises, and some made in the past out of well-meaning ignorance cannot easily be changed. These concern your family.

There is some envy. You did not say that you intended to devote yourself to your own painting, and this should be verbalized. The family compromises began long ago, out of a misguided sense of sympathy, and now to some extent or another will continue. Here you are caught in a compromise of emotions. Ruburt feels this particularly strongly, because he is so sensitive over such relationships to begin with. The situation however is such that almost any clear emotion is automatically denied expression, shunted aside and often replaced completely by an opposite—all under the guise of the idea of (in quotes) “being good and understanding.”

Now apart from that, Ruburt has his own feelings, which are somewhat exaggerated, but he also usually tries to disregard them emotionally. He says “I overreact to Rob’s mother,” and intellectually then says “that is silly,” but he never allows himself to experience the feelings themselves. He does not want to hurt you. He does not want things to be unpleasant.

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.

Fifteen years of that at one end of the scale, he thought, and ten or fifteen in the middle with your mother on Sundays. His loyalty as you know is binding. If he thought she had been a great mother to you then your Jane’s feelings would not be so strong.

Ruburt felt “Here was another ranter and raver, another tyrant in skirts, taking my free day of the week.” Now. He felt better physically when he realized the feelings at that point, and when even through a reproachful silence he expressed them. When they returned he felt them again. Then they vanished again.

He would not though, you see, express those feelings to you.

Ruburt is progressing. The exercises (yoga) are good, in case you wondered. His willingness to physically exert himself is important here. The physical effort involved. The body is awakening, in those terms. The sleeping requirements were a result of the sudden use of physical energy. He should find the requirements quite lessened this week, and that should be followed by a noticeable easy release of physical energy during the normal day.

Florence. (In Italy.) The master wants to get the same feeling of bulk and three-dimensional weight and size from flat painting—molding color rather than rock. They think it cannot be done. He is fascinated by the concept.

Out of his desire he applies energy (gestures) and color over it, so that the paintings have then the reality he hopes for.

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.

(Rembrandt’s technique has been the subject of much speculation over the centuries. Especially when he took to piling pigment up to a thickness of a quarter of an inch in such paintings as “The Jewish Bride”—a masterwork. It is thought he used stand oil—heat-treated linseed oil—and varnish of various kinds as a medium. If he added anything else to his pigments it would be well worth learning about.)

(Perhaps I carried out some of my experiments with painting the outdoor sculpture in Denmark, where winter weather must be considered, after visiting Italy. While I discussed the Florence, Italy, data with Jane after the session, Seth returned very briefly re Rembrandt:That is why he went to Florence—to see the sculpture there. Perhaps after my return to Denmark from Italy I did some experimenting re painting sculptures, and then passed this information on to Rembrandt?