“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As I said to Jane yesterday, now that I’m back painting it seems incredible that I ever left it—even though when I chose to concentrate upon Mass Events this summer I thought that was a good decision also. I still don’t see anything wrong with the decision, but evidently my body—my psyche—rather violently disagreed, considering the beliefs I must carry around with me.

Now: the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland was, I believe, a mathematician of note in his time.

(Pause.) He considered himself to be excellent at his work. It gave him a professional respectability, a feeling of worth and merit. He found it—his occupation—to be a responsible one, befitting an adult. The occupation filled many of his needs and expressed some of his abilities. In his spare time, however, for a lark, simply because he wanted to, he wrote his Alice in Wonderland—a book that is a masterpiece at many levels. What a shock when he discovered that the world was ignoring what he thought to be his important contribution to mathematics. He believed (underlined) that he should devote all of his time to his work, and could hardly forgive himself for his regrettable lapses into writing—and he was writing, after all, not even for adults, and not for young males either.

He was, in a fashion only, sexually ambiguous, his mathematics expressing what he thought of as an acceptable male aspect while the artistic levels in his mind, now, he related to his feminine aspects. So he was to some extent a divided man. His creativity showed itself, however, when he allowed himself to play, when he forgot what he thought he should do, and did what he wanted to do.

(Pause.) Because of his beliefs he considered himself somewhat of a failure, and the rich, evocative nature of his own stories did not meet with the approval of his academically attuned mind. Despite himself, however, he was stretching the dimensions of his own consciousness, exercising his consciousness in different directions, expanding the scope of his abilities—and in so doing contributing a small masterpiece to the world.

Cézanne, as you know, was not a happy man. He could have been a far better artist still, for if his vision was intense, my dear friend, it was cramped, and it moved within itself in an agony to find a creative release that could never be found in the creative product alone, but in the psyche from which that product emerges.

(Jane spoke very intently in trance. Seth’s material on Cézanne was excellent.)

They often worked by choice with a multitude of workmen, apprentices, students, hangers-on and whatever. For all of Michelangelo’s ranting, he found great zest in the political tumult of his time, in which he was of course quite intimately involved. He played church and state against each other, made an ass of the Pope whenever he could, and was deeply involved in the social, political, and religious fervor of those days.

That applies even more of course to Da Vinci, who was a social dilettante besides, but a man of incredible vision—a psychic if you prefer, who invented in his mind gadgets that would not physically come into your world for centuries.

The inner creative man knows, as the child did, that the way will be cleared. There was Miss Bowman, there was art school and so forth—so I want you to remember that inner man. Social beliefs, beliefs from childhood or whatever are (underlined) overlays. They are superficial. They have unfortunate effects only when you do not trust the inner self.