“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today I mentioned to Jane that I’d like Seth to go into some of the elements of question 17 on the list I’ve compiled so far—especially those parts of it pertaining to why didn’t the overall personality know when it had gone far enough, or even too far, concerning the symptoms. I also was curious as to what he’d say about my speculation that the symptoms themselves might actually be one of her main challenges in this life.

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.

You also ignore the fact that even the kind of painting you do could not be done by anyone else, and contains within it the raw material of your own unique and natural experience with life, and no one else’s.

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.) 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.