“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Following those items, I wanted Seth to comment on question 2, having to do with the good things we’ve accomplished over the years.

Such images have little to do with your own basic or natural personalities, or with your own individual backgrounds, but you apply such images upon yourselves like overlays. In such cases you are unable to really estimate your own progress of your own accomplishments, for you are not looking at them based upon your own capabilities and inclinations, but using the hypothetical idealized images instead.

(Pause.) Now you have always from childhood drawn or painted, and in that regard there has been that constant interest. You looked out at the world through the eyes of a painter—but it was more than a painter’s world you saw (a great line, as Jane said). You were also always interested in writing. At times you expect from yourself a kind of accomplishment that the first kind of artist might produce, without any due regard for the fact that you are your own person, that you possessed a love of words as well, that you had excellent critical capacities.

That experience of that kind does not come at 20, or even at 30. Part of your accomplishment lies in our sessions and your own considerable work with the notes, and with the invisible aura contained in those notes, for there in a different way you are painting a portrait—a portrait of two lives from a highly individualistic standpoint, extremely unique—and that is the kind of experience that would be ripped out of your life’s fabric, were you the hypothetical idealized version with whom you sometimes relate—a version highly romanticized, let me add.

(Pause at 9:35.) Such ideas, then, prevent you from enjoying your own accomplishments, as you should more properly do, and from enjoying their growth through time, from the background that was your own. The same applies to Ruburt.

(Pause.) Today’s mail shows of course the better side of your readership, letters from people in many walks of life who are not fanatics, but who are normal individuals who recognize quality and who are seeking it. You are changing their lives, or allowing them to do so, of course, helping them release their own abilities—accomplishments that should be considered in line, again, with your own backgrounds, and not compared with hypothetical ones.

This is all apart from the considerable accomplishment of holding your own in the society while doing your own things, and in achieving a good deal of freedom in that regard. Your psychological growth is not something you can look at in the mirror, yet it is that growth that is also responsible for your painting and writing Ruburt’s books and his connections with me. In a fashion Ruburt’s symptoms are caused because he tries to understand his abilities and his life in a too-limited context, with definitions still too narrow. We are trying to broaden those definitions.