“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.

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.

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.

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.