“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was known at your place of employment. An unconscious bargain had been made by you and your employers. They knew precisely how much you would work for, and to what ends you would work. They also knew that you did not want more money—this is precisely what you did not want. More money simply would have made the temptation stronger. You made your attitude quite clear. You did not want advancement, and you did not want more money.

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.

Understanding your own reactions helps you understand the reactions of others. Otherwise you would find other people’s reactions far too alien, and not be able to relate to them personally or through your work. This applies to both of you.

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.

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.

(Rembrandt copiously achieved this effect in his later works, especially the last ten years or so of his life. I don’t believe Jane knew this in those terms. I am well aware of it, and want to use effects similar to this in my own work, and have done so at times in past works. I haven’t discussed it with Jane, though, just considering it a technical problem involved in the art, as I would suppose she would work at writing a paragraph, etc.

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.

You were indeed. You were the man who experimented with color, as applied however to sculpts. And one of your discoveries was of the binding agent adopted by the master painter in his work.

(I also work, usually, with one color layer over another, rather than mixing them while wet. This maintains purity and clarity of color—and has been considered sound painting technique over the years.)

(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.

(A note added 31 years later, while I prepare this Volume 2 of The Personal Sessions for publication. As gifts for me because of my interest in their great creativity, Jane “tuned into”, on her own and without Seth, excellent books on the artist Paul Cézanne in 1977 and on the philosopher William James in 1978. Both works have been published.