“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Self-disclosure and the desire for perfection are each involved, then. You know that no self-disclosure will lead to perfection, and yet self-disclosure and perfection can seem to be like opposites. Do not think in terms of perfection and nonperfection, but of bringing your ideas to life, and of using photographs to express those ideas.

The idea of disclosure however is more important, for you remember that your mother did not like to have her photograph taken. If you included any pictures of her, would she be annoyed? She did not like to have her picture taken on the one hand because she feared disclosure, and on the other hand, because her sense of perfection was affected—particularly in later years by an imperfect image.

Your private nature makes you wonder if that involves too much disclosure, particularly where family members are concerned. The connection with paintings brings about your desire that the photographs be “as perfect as possible.” You do not want anyone else to have a hand in your own work—that is in your paintings. To reproduce paintings, or in this case photographs, seems to be tampering with them in that regard. That is, if an editor changed your copy you would be annoyed, but reproduction, you fear, can change the copy of a photograph or a painting if it is not done properly. You consider photographs originals in that regard.

You understand that private experience, imperfect but creative, underlies the points in “Unknown” Reality. Creatively you see the photographs’ value, but they still caused a conflict between your ideas of perfection and self-disclosure, particularly as they were related to your mother’s attitudes.

[...] Besides this, it seems to you that such encounters involve a simplification and distortion by their very nature as far as your work is concerned, along with a unique kind of psychological disclosure that could be humiliating, lacking the proper frame of understanding. [...]

[...] Not that Seth claims any kind of omnipotence, because he doesn’t. His material, however, is clearly providing such translations of unconscious knowledge, and intuitive disclosures; disclosures, according to Seth, no more remarkable than those available in nature itself, but we have forgotten how to read nature’s messages; disclosures no more mysterious than those available in our own states of inspiration, but we’ve forgotten how to decipher those communications too. [...]

[...] What you think of as disclosure is the apparent difference between the ideal and the actuality, as you understand each.

As an artist alone your purpose is expression, which involves disclosure, the difference between the ideal and actual. [...]

(“Maybe my feelings weren’t caused by any thing, but some kind of acceleration toward a state I couldn’t reach, instead of any great disclosure for the world,” Jane said a little later. [...]

[...] Because it does, art can often make disclosures that offend the pious, the well-mannered. [...]

As Seth continued dictation I was fired by his purpose to make the unknown elements of human life at least partially visible — an audacious goal, I thought — and I tried to do my part in recording all such disclosures as they appeared in our lives and were reflected in the experiences of our friends and students.

“As an artist alone your purpose is expression, which involves disclosures, the difference between the ideal and the actual. [...]

[...] Art always serves as some self-disclosure, in which the art stands for the person, and the art is sent abroad, for example. [...]

[...] He struggles against such disclosures to begin with. [...]