“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.

(“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.