“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The 54th envelope experiment was held tonight. The object was a homemade pattern made on light-colored paper, with hand-ground gray brown earth color for pigment and polymer medium for binder. It was folded once as indicated in the making. The effect is like an inkblot, except that the quality and texture of the paint is much superior as far as charm goes; this particular hand-ground pigment, which I make myself by heating a certain Italian earth color, has a texture like fine cement or roughened stone. Since it is a heavy-bodied pigment, it was built up in spots on the object as much as 1/32 of an inch thick. The whole pattern was made up of lines and white spots which do not show very well in my tracing. I placed the object, folded once, between the usual two pieces of Bristol and sealed it in the double envelopes.

(“The feeling of a fluid dark color, broken by white shapes that appear like blocks.” The wet pigment used to make the object was a fluid dark color, of course. Seth now uses the block data to refer to the whites scattered through the object on the original. Some of the whites are of a block shape, roughly, but more often simply irregular just as the pigment is.

(Jane of course had never seen this object, or any others like it, because I have never made them before. I made two of them on May 10,1966; I dated one of them and used the other in the envelope. The pigment color is quite dark, but not black. The stonelike or rough surface and the dark color enter into the experimental results.

(“Dark printed matter.” As stated, the pigment used on the object is quite dark, a burnt gray brown, but it is not black. Jane’s impression of it, I noted, was that it was darker to her than to me. I don’t know whether Seth uses printed here to mean an ink applied to paper or newsprint, or just some other substance applied to a surface as in the case of the object.

[...] Especially when he took to piling pigment up to a thickness of a quarter of an inch in such paintings as “The Jewish Bride”—a masterwork. [...] If he added anything else to his pigments it would be well worth learning about.)

(Lead white, for centuries, has been the recommended white pigment for oils, and indeed before this century was the only white available, as far as I know. [...] Even today most authorities still regard it as having superior properties to all other white pigments. [...]

There was a varnish, finally, that you mixed in with some of the pigments after they were prepared, with the dry pigments after they were prepared, that served as a binding agent that also protected each color from the other one. [...]

You also experimented with inserting odors into pigment, very briefly, for churches, so that a violet for example would smell like the flower. You would mix ground rose petals into the red pigment to be used for a painting of roses.

Instead of paints, pigments, words, musical notes, the creators begin to experiment with dimensions of actuality, imparting knowledge in as many forms as possible — and I do not mean physical forms. What you would call time is manipulated as an artist would manipulate pigment. [...]

[...] I also carried paint pigments, or what ended up as paint pigments. [...]

[...] Instead, you change your pigments. And, in this case, your pigments are your thoughts and your imagination. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] The trees in his painting, being artificial reproductions, do not undergo the same physical changes, even while the atoms and molecules that compose the canvas itself, and all the pigments, constantly themselves change.

[...] If a painter finds his hands stained with pigment at the end of a day, he can wash the stain off easily, knowing its nature. [...]

(“Yes, there are several kinds, made by Permanent Pigments in Cincinnati—”)

[...] The topmost layers of the subconscious hold then, first of all, almost conscious just-under-the-surface needs and desires; and under these those more deeply buried, reaching backward to birth, even as the loose dry autumn leaves still contain traces of earlier pigment.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Yet Seth told Rob how to mix and use certain pigments, and Rob has added the information to his repertoire. [...]

[...] Her painting is her unhampered creative translation of the Seth material into pigments instead of words. [...]