“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.

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.

(“Well, with the pendulum I’d arrived at the idea that my stomach bothered me because of a conflict between painting and writing—the time I have for each. I want to do them both—it isn’t that I prefer one over the other. I received the answer that I felt guilty over the conflict: when I wanted to do one, I thought I should be working on the other.”)

(And those are the ones that count, it appears. I felt much better after the session last night. I slept well, and worked well at painting this morning. But when I began typing this material after lunch, the stomach complaints returned. to some degree—proof to me that Seth’s diagnosis had been quite accurate.