Finding The Center Of The Self (2)

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 9, Session 451

Finding The Center Of The Self (2)

A few more remarks concerning the center of the self, before I continue with a longer discussion.

(To Rob) You will find evidence of the center of your self in your paintings, of course.  There is a continuity that follows through all existences, and shows itself in the endeavors and creations of the individuals involved.

There will be a core within your own paintings, from which the whole composition springs, and it is here that you can find rapport with the center of your self.  The center contains condensed knowledge, not only of seemingly past lives, but also of the future.  Of this, in your work, you create a new dimension.

That center is like a road that you can follow inward.  Remembered faces of those you have known, and remembered scenes from other existences, form the nucleus of your experience; the forms that you bring, seemingly out of nothing, into actuality.  Although you are not consciously aware of the past familiarity, nevertheless you use the knowledge to your conscious advantage.

In one way you are the steps leading up to yourself, or the spirals leading in to yourself.  The painting spirals outward from your inner reality, and it brings forth energy and previous connections and interpretations.  You form these anew, however, adding to them the knowledge and vitality of your present self.

It is somewhat easier for the artist or poet to find this center of the self.  The intuitive symbols can be better recognized.  Now you can grab a hold of the original inspiration for a painting, and ride it outward, or you can look at your own completed painting and ride it inward to its source.

In either case when conditions are right, you should feel a sense of recognition, a sense of grasping a portion of the center of your own reality.  This is not a nebulous experience, but vivid, powerful, and direct.  You will know it at once.  When you have achieved this oneness with your own center, then you automatically free additional energy and vitality into your life.

Your painting itself will seem to expand, for the channels will be opened.  The symbols that you work with will grow in depth and validity, for they will be symbols that will be recalled to some degree by all men.  There may be a definite memory recall, a few curious moments when time dissolves, when even beneath a portrait you have painted you will see another face.

Now when you, with your love of images, look at a face, relax for a moment.  Slightly let yourself fall out of focus, look away, and then back to the face of the subject.  Tell yourself that you will see the features and the structures shift.  You will see the face behind the face, the image of the person as it was in a past life.

You need not paint one neck with ten heads, but the one portrait can be made to suggest previous structures and characteristics that have merged to produce the present head.  You can look through the face therefore, as an archaeologist would look through rock.  Such a portrait will immediately be fascinating, particularly of course to the subject, who will intuitively and unconsciously recognize its components.

A too-rigid rendition can frighten the subject by imprisoning him within the moment, from which it seems he cannot escape.  Obviously the technique can be as realistic as you like, however.  It is that the lines, seeming so realistic, also symbolically suggest what the viewer himself cannot see in his own face, but knows is there.  And so the landscape, not one but many landscapes in one, for while it is unique in a given moment, still it is a composite in your terms of the pasts that have formed it, and the futures that act upon it even now.

In that respect the landscape has its center.  Your own thoughts are like the outward spokes of a wheel.  They are not at the center of yourself, but have traveled a long way from the center of yourself.  You may therefore follow them backward.  We have been dealing so with the diversity of the self that I want to assure you that within all this diversity the center can be found and recognized.

It is after all the you from which you spring, and the impetus within the present self.