“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session started late because Jane became so involved in a painting after supper. It was one in which she was attempting to follow in a still-life some of the techniques I’d showed her a few days ago, when I repainted another still-life composition she’d started, and showed her how to get more opaque effects for variety; a demonstration, then, for she’d asked for “a lesson.” Since then there have been some rather humorous episodes—I mean it kindly—as Jane tries to use those methods, with very mixed results. But interestingly, she ran into conflicts between her old method, in which she used mostly transparent color, and the new one, which, she complained in her frustration, was “muddy, and lacking vitality. And without the vitality, what good is it?”

You show a certain picture of yourself to the world. You stress certain characteristics, and show them to others. There are habitual patterns of behavior that operate, as you more or less stabilize your picture of yourself in relationship with families and friends. Sometimes that picture is a fairly faithful representation, and sometimes people make artificial portraits of themselves, and instead of speaking for themselves to others, they let their artificial portraits do it for them.

Psychocybernetics (underlined) is a good handbook, very simplified, with some distortions, but its premise is quite correct: you do hypnotize yourself into such situations. I want to make a point that Ruburt can often interpret relaxation as depression, because the loss of tension can still be frightening. You have actually helped in that regard. The dreams show your activity in Framework 2 —and again, may I recommend on Ruburt’s part some sense of creativity in his physical situation? Even suggestions should be given playfully, not heavy-handedly. For his point-of-power exercises have him just playfully for five minutes pretend—knowing that it is a game—that he feels perfectly normal and relaxed. Let him consider impulses also playfully, not looking at each one as if it were as important as the ending of the world.