“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) He considered himself to be excellent at his work. It gave him a professional respectability, a feeling of worth and merit. He found it—his occupation—to be a responsible one, befitting an adult. The occupation filled many of his needs and expressed some of his abilities. In his spare time, however, for a lark, simply because he wanted to, he wrote his Alice in Wonderland—a book that is a masterpiece at many levels. What a shock when he discovered that the world was ignoring what he thought to be his important contribution to mathematics. He believed (underlined) that he should devote all of his time to his work, and could hardly forgive himself for his regrettable lapses into writing—and he was writing, after all, not even for adults, and not for young males either.

(Pause.) Because of his beliefs he considered himself somewhat of a failure, and the rich, evocative nature of his own stories did not meet with the approval of his academically attuned mind. Despite himself, however, he was stretching the dimensions of his own consciousness, exercising his consciousness in different directions, expanding the scope of his abilities—and in so doing contributing a small masterpiece to the world.

As in the case of Cézanne, masterpieces would justify all else. Even relationships would make no difference—and Ruburt in his way made the same judgments about the “writer.”

[...] Jane shook her head as if in doubt.) The impression of a masterpiece of some kind in connection with what I hold. [...]

[...] So we were now curious to learn what application, if any, such statements as four, a masterpiece, a voice, etc., had to the test object. [...]

(I did not realize at the time that Seth did not explain the masterpiece statement; I could have asked otherwise. [...]

[...] A poem, a musical masterpiece, a sculpture, a novel, an opera, into a great piece of architecture. [...]

[...] Pretend then that you possessed within yourself the knowledge, the sight, of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they throbbed and pulsed as realities within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve it; that there was neither rock, nor pigment, nor source of any of these, and you ached with the yearning to produce them—and this, on an infinitesimally small scale, will perhaps give you, as an artist, some idea of the agony and the impetus that was felt.

When a masterpiece is created everything else is forgotten, and so it is with life situations. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Your own masterpieces exist, and only wait for you to find them and give them physical form.

[...] As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.

[...] These are not rigid parents, though, blindly following conventions, but people who see family life as a fine living creative art, and children as masterpieces in flesh and blood. Far from devouring their offspring by an excess of overprotective care, they joyfully send their children out into the world, knowing that in their terms the masterpieces must complete themselves, and that they have helped with the underpainting.

[...] Pretend, then, that you possessed within yourself the knowledge of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they pulsed as realities within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve them, that there was neither rock nor pigment nor source of any of these, and you ached with the yearning to produce them. [...]