“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: you (to me) have been wondering whether or not to use family photographs in “Unknown” Reality. On the one hand you see how they fit into the book. Yet photographs are also connected in your mind with paintings to some degree. This is visual data, and as far as photographs are concerned personal data, out in the open, so to speak.

Your private nature makes you wonder if that involves too much disclosure, particularly where family members are concerned. The connection with paintings brings about your desire that the photographs be “as perfect as possible.” You do not want anyone else to have a hand in your own work—that is in your paintings. To reproduce paintings, or in this case photographs, seems to be tampering with them in that regard. That is, if an editor changed your copy you would be annoyed, but reproduction, you fear, can change the copy of a photograph or a painting if it is not done properly. You consider photographs originals in that regard.

The idea of disclosure however is more important, for you remember that your mother did not like to have her photograph taken. If you included any pictures of her, would she be annoyed? She did not like to have her picture taken on the one hand because she feared disclosure, and on the other hand, because her sense of perfection was affected—particularly in later years by an imperfect image.

Your stomach began to bother you when you considered whether or not to use photographs. (On Sunday, when I bought an album to keep them in.) You have the idea of how the book can appear, a model that exists in your mind. Use the model, but let it be a flexible one, in which your ideals work with the material at hand, molding it. Do not exaggerate, however, so that the ideal seems to be a perfection that cannot be attained given the conditions.