“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For example: You were pleased, Joseph, with the portrait you did and showed Ruburt, remarking, however, that you wished you had done such work earlier, and on other occasions you have made similar remarks. You will compare your own life and work often in a critical fashion to artists who were obsessed with one art from the beginning of their lives, or who pursued what is really a kind of straight and undeviating course—a brave courageous one, perhaps, and highly focused, but one that must be in certain respects (underlined) limited in scope and complexity, not crossing any barriers except those that seem to occur strictly within painting’s realm itself (all intently.

(I should add here that as Seth gave this material I found myself thinking that that wasn’t too bad a way to go, after all. I do admire that intense focus, that wholehearted commitment, and history offers plenty of examples—famous, too, if you will —of gifted individuals who lived their lives that way and made great contributions....

As a rule, psychics are not particularly good writers. He tries to view his own work through some idealized image of a psyche who is as gifted as he is as a writer, and also highly gifted in meeting the public, putting on performances, acting as a healer, as a prophet, and as an expert therapist all at once, and in so doing his own characteristics and natural abilities and inclinations become lost along the way.

All of these issues are important. You should always address yourself to the natural person, and when Ruburt becomes confused about images, it is because he is relating himself to other composite versions that he thinks he should live up to.

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.