“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As for myself, I’ve been trying to get in four hours of painting each day, without succeeding, by the way, but it’s still a real treat. Last Saturday I bought over $30.00 worth of flower seeds, and I’m slowly trying them out in a variety of pots and containers to see which flowers do best under what circumstances—artificial light, natural light, etc. It’s turning out to be quite an intriguing endeavor, and I plan to keep the house decorated with fresh flowers winter and summer.

(The index proofs for God of Jane arrived day before yesterday, and Jane found them okay when she checked them today. Tam told her recently the book would be out in May. Mass Events was supposed to come out on March 13, but this date is evidently in error, since we’ve just learned we won’t see front-matter proofs until next week. Jane thinks Tam meant the paperback edition of Volume 2 of “Unknown,” since the week’s sales figures, which arrived today, show sales of some 3,000 copies of that edition. But we’re still uneasy over the whole Mass Events affair —the disclaimer question, Jane’s reaction to the book itself since Seth started giving it, etc.—and any delay only serves to make us more suspicious, I’m afraid. I guess I never saw a book being looked forward to less than that one.

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.

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.

(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.

(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.