“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’re presenting his material for me because it has good general application: If Seth deals with my own painted images without even mentioning the words reincarnation or counterparts, still he does reveal how such “residents of the mind” make up part of each person’s innate knowledge of his or her own greater — or larger — self.

The infant sees mental images before birth, before the eyes are open. Your memory, it seems, is your own — yet I have told you that you have a history of other existences. You remember other faces, even though the mind you call the conscious one may not recognize the images from that deep inner memory. It must often clothe them in fantasy. You are yourself. Your self is secure in its own identity, unique in its characteristics, meeting life and the seasons in a way that has never happened before, and will never happen again — yet still you are a unique version of your greater self. You share in certain overall patterns that are in themselves original.

It is as if you shared, say, a psychological planet, populated by people who had the same roots, the same ground of being — as if you shared the same continents, mountains, and oceans. Instead you share certain patterns of development, images, memories, and desires. These are reflected in your physical life, and in one way or another elements of your life are shared in the same fashion.

(9:15.) Your [painted] faces represent such a recognition. You always thought (underlined twice) that your artistic talent should be enough. You thought (underlined twice) that it should be your consuming passion, but you never felt that it was — for if it was you would have followed it undeviatingly. (Long pause.) For you, painting had to be wedded to a deeper kind of understanding. Painting was even to be a teacher, leading you through and beyond images, and back to them again.

Your painting was meant to bring out from the recesses of your being the accumulation of your knowledge in the form of images — not of people you might meet now on the street, but portraits of the residents of the mind. The residents of the mind are very real. In a certain fashion, they are your parents more than your parents were, and when you express their realities, they are also expressing yours. All time is simultaneous. Only the illusion of time on each of your parts keeps you from greeting each other. To some extent, when you paint such portraits you are forming psychic bridges between yourself and those other selves: Your own identity as yourself grows.

Only in a manner of speaking (repeated twice), there are certain — (humorously:) a necessary qualifying word — “power selves,” or personalities; parts of your greater identity who utilized fairly extraordinary amounts of energy in very constructive ways. That energy is also a part of your personality — and as you paint such images you will undoubtedly feel some considerable bursts of ambition, and even exuberance. The feelings will allow you to identify the images of such personalities.

2. Seth mentioned a “correspondence” among my dreams, painting, and writing because just lately I’ve been doing small oil paintings of a few of my more vivid dream images. I’ve discovered that this is great fun — and much more challenging than I’d anticipated, as I try to reduce the shifting, brilliant dream elements to the motionless painted surfaces we’re so used to in waking reality. Each little painting becomes a unique adventure both technically and emotionally, and I hardly succeed in solving every attempt I make. Now, futilely, I wonder why I didn’t try painting images from my dreams at a much earlier age; and why one so seldom hears about other artists doing the same thing. I don’t personally know any other artist working with dreams this way.