“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The same year I painted my self-portrait, I painted Jane as I saw her in my dream of March 10, 1987. [...]

I painted myself when I was 68 years old. [...]

I painted Seth, that ageless “energy personality essence,” from a vision I had of him five years after Jane began speaking for him in 1963. [...]

[...] Your trouble of yesterday and today does indeed originate because you have not been painting, but one of the reasons that you have not been painting is that energy has been used as a searchlight into the past, searching for certain origins.

[...] My further suggestions are that you return to painting or sketching, and you will find that your energies will now be allowed much more freedom.

[...] The outer relationships are serving you well, for you are already storing up many ideas for your work, for your painting, that have at least partially come as a result of your perception of others.

[...] From the wealth of inner data your nature demands that you form new gestalts, and in painting them you automatically relate them outward. [...]

You are close to releasing yourself in a particular way through your painting, through your work, and you will find this way intuitively. [...] It is this very nearness that made you dissatisfied with what you had just finished, an inner comparison of this with work you will do in the very (underlined) near future; and no reflection on the leaf painting, except by future contrasts. [...]

(“I have just one question: what do you think of the painting of the leaf I just finished?” In tempera.)

(“I found myself thinking it wasn’t too good a painting.”)

It is a good painting. [...]

(9:50.) Most artists, painters now, are lost, so to speak, in the moment or moments of the painting’s creation. The painting becomes the creation, and also it is the passing time of reality. [...]

[...] You will want to paint, to prepare “Unknown.” Now painting is in one regard timeless, though it will flow into time. [...]

[...] He likes to paint, but he does not regard that in the same way, so let him allow himself an hour a day for painting, or so many hours a week—whatever he wants.

[...] Any of you can measure the painting on the wall that is of me in a previous life. [...] You can prove a painting exists on the wall. You cannot measure the psychological impact of the painting, however, nor the psychic reality that is within it. [...]

The painting, indeed, did help. She wanted to make herself known, and through the painting you let her know that, indeed, she had. [...]

[...] This will improve your painting, your creative life, and your psychic life, but you are turning inward too much without knowing what you are doing, at this time. [...]

([Laurie:] “The painting helped?”)

[...] The resentment, carried far enough, could affect your work to such a degree that it forced you to leave, which is exactly what one portion of you wants—and that portion does not care how this is done, though it does not want your painting affected.

[...] You are also afraid however, to some extent and under certain conditions, of working, even painting, entirely at home because your father worked at home and did not do well.

You were more affected by your friend’s (Curtis Kent) departure than you realize, wondering if you yourself should find a better-paying commercial job, and yet angry that you even had such thoughts when what you really wanted was to stay home and paint.

Do your painting of your light experience² — and of course continue with your [other] painting.

[...] In my frustration, I told Jane over the weekend that I intended to go back to painting, starting this morning, but it didn’t work out that way. [...]

“As I came out of the experience a few moments later I resolved to paint a small oil of it, as I’ve done following my three previous perceptions of the light of the universe this year — on February 9 and 10, and on June 16. [...]

(See my painting at the end of this session.)

[...] The painting should be maintained, however, as a refreshing activity. [...]

[...] You are painting portraits indeed. [...]

(9:35.) In your painting, you are constantly involved with bringing some event into the world that was not there before. [...] You recognize the absence in the present of the physical painting you want to produce, and your creativity brings that painting into reality. [...]

[...] If you really learned to trust Framework 2, you would set your goals there, and trust that they would be as creatively manifested as your books or paintings. [...]

[...] With a smile:) When you want to express darkness you might paint your canvas with black instead of your magic white (a la William Alexander), so that then the use of lighter colors upon it will indicate more clearly the quality of light, at least for the painting’s purposes. [...]

[...] Now yours is, say, the poetry of painting. [...]

[...] (Pause.) You are not simply trying to look at the world differently, for example, or to change a hypothetical reality, but to creatively bring about some version of a creative and artistic vision that results not simply in greater poems or paintings, but in greater renditions of reality (all very intently.

This does not mean that he was fated to do any such thing, that it would not be done more easily in other fashions, but you can see some correspondence there by looking at his (underlined) paintings, and the vivid use of contrasting colors that are not subtle. [...]

[...] He felt that in a way he was doing this for both of you: that despite what you said, if you wanted to paint for a living, or rather, simply to paint and thereby live, you would take those chances that he was taking, and whatever consequences that followed.

[...] So if you had a job he felt you were sacrificing, but if you did not then he expected you to paint your best, and make the world take it, and pay for it.

[...] He became angry, and still is, when you show normal criticism of Prentice and their dealings with our books, or his, because he feels that you do not really understand how difficult it is to market creative work, and since you do not sell your paintings you should not criticize his admittedly worrisome efforts. [...]

[...] But in the old contract you had psychically made in this life, either of you would have done anything he felt, to paint and write and make the world accept what you did and pay for it.

For this reason you also feel that they are not challenging to produce, as compared with your other paintings. Ordinarily you seldom paint women, feeling that in such paintings emotions would be too blatantly displayed. [...]

When your relationship becomes uneasy to a certain degree, then this impedes the spontaneity that you allow yourself in your paintings. [...]

[...] You do not dare allow your intuitions full reign even when you paint at such times for fear that they will carry up with them these repressed feelings.

[...] At such times you became more alarmed working with your oils and colors, and wanted a retreat, and sought for greater distance in your paintings.

[...] I told you that some, though not serious, symptom flare-up could occur during the painting process. [...]

[...] I have told you the very practical and symbolic meaning behind the painting and alteration of your physical environment. [...]

[...] Hence his painting the cupboards blue.

The painting and the two visits, taken together, will be as effective as the lost vacation. [...]

Take two paintings of the same shape and size; that is, two paintings that take up the same amount of space in your universe. One painting is extremely crude and poorly done. The other painting not only seems of superior quality, but also appears to undergo a continual transformation while still taking up the same amount of space.

Say that the painting is a landscape, and that this transformation includes within the same amount of space the addition continually of more trees, more hills; that the hills still within the same amount of space allotted to the painting grow taller, and yet never shoot past the frame. [...]

Imagine if you can the figures or inhabitants in the painting having psychological reality, all within the set limits prescribed by the given space. [...]

[...] This gives me afternoons free to paint, and is a very satisfactory arrangement.)

[...] I had the vague idea that I’d use the drawings as references for portraits that I would paint of her. [...] (I have yet to paint those particular images, but still plan to do so.)

[...] The 15 three-ring binders containing her poems, all neatly typed, for example; her essays and journals; other blocks of unpublished Seth material, one of which I mentioned in the Introduction; an unfinished autobiography that perhaps I could put into publishable shape; likewise, passages from an unfinished fourth Oversoul Seven novel, in which Jane dealt with Seven’s childhood; a book of her paintings, with commentary; several early novels that I still believe merit publishing. [...]

Some automatic painting can be expected along this line with our student here. [...]

And I look forward, through Ruburt, to seeing some of these automatic paintings, also some insights that you are looking for. [...]

[...] Remember that when you go to sleep at night; remember the colors that you see—for you do see them and you can paint them. [...]

([Laurie:] “Are dreams a step towards the automatic paintings?”)

(To Laurie.) I suggest that you try to paint your impression of the personality that is in your house. [...] Simply stand there with your paints and brushes and begin to paint without waiting for the impression. The brush will paint. [...]

[...] I was now simply trying to live each day, painting, working on the files, or in the yard, doing errands, and so forth. [...] I’ve managed to come up with some new insights about painting, however, and have begun implementing them. [...]

[...] And to me: “Sometimes I think that you, whenever you get any idea that doesn’t have to do with painting, ought to stamp it out with both feet, and just stick to that. [...]

[...] Your world view includes paintings that exist in your imagination, as well as paintings done in your terms “so far.”

[...] But they exist also amid your attitudes concerning the culture, your age, and the time that it seems must be involved with painting. [...]

You can only do so much in your painting. [...] You cannot appreciate, for that matter, all the systems of reality in which the painting does have reality. This is a very simple analogy: However, in some aspects a projection to another system could be likened to a situation in which you entered the landscape of one of your own paintings.

[...] Most systems have more reality than a painting, but not all of them. [...] Your paintings are a creation, and yet by their nature they are limitations. [...] You paint one house within a landscape for example. [...]

[...] Painting a picture is aggressive. [...]

Each painting that you create represents the death of the self that you were before you created it. [...]