Applying The Law Of Attraction To Finances

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 404

Applying The Law Of Attraction To Finances

Now Joseph, a few remarks.  These may sound simple to you.  Ruburt has learned, the hard way, that the physical image is a direct materialization of the inner state of mind.

He knows this now through direct personal experience.  If he had believed me in the beginning, and followed the precepts in the material, he would not have had such an experience.

Now.  I recommend Maltz because his exercises are based on truths, even though he does not fully understand what lies beneath.  Do you want me to tell you how to better your financial circumstances or do you want to learn the hard way?

(“No.  Tell me.”  See Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.)

You have been told but you have not taken the information seriously because you were not ready, as earlier Ruburt was not ready to.  First of all, all negative attitudes must be removed from your consciousness.  You are attracting further financial problems in your desperation.  You are focusing upon poverty rather than wealth.

It may seem to you highly impractical, unrealistic and downright foolish to ignore the physical circumstances of debts and expenses.  To focus upon them, I tell you, is to bring more upon yourself.  The rule of expectation applies.

When you receive a bill do not automatically react as you have, instead as if you were contemplating a new painting.  Form in your mind the image of a check to that amount.  See yourself celebrating as you pay the final amount on your car.  See in your mind’s eye a surplus of money in your folder when the month’s expenses are paid.

Now your financial situation will not change no matter how you push yourself, unless you apply such simple exercises.  You do not do this naturally, which is why they are required.  You must indeed think consciously in terms of plenty rather than of want.  On several occasions Ruburt has followed these and your wants have been fulfilled.

You have been fighting him in this regard, and this has impeded the efforts he has lately been making.  Now these exercises will prove themselves out in practical terms, but you must give them the opportunity to prove themselves.

Your subjective life has been somewhat permeated by thoughts of want, and literally poverty, until you have indeed exaggerated your own situation.  The exaggerated situation could come to pass however if you persist in projecting those images outward.

They would not help you get a raise but act to the contrary, and they have done so in the past.  I am giving you advice in very practical terms.  What you do with it is up to you.  But you have severely limited yourself in this respect.

In the past Ruburt helped you generate such negative ideas, but he has been making an attempt to combat them.  His own experience has proven to him that I was right in other regards.  As long as you believe that others are taking advantage of you, they will do so.  The origin is in yourself, and this is what you have not so far understood.

(“I think I have been aware of that.”)

The origin is not in others.  For fifteen minutes a day agree to suspend critical judgment, and following the Maltz method imagine yourself vividly in the position you would like to be.  The rest of the time consciously make an effort to control your attitude when you find yourself thinking in terms of want or poverty.  Then switch your thoughts to ideas of plenty.  This need not involve hypocrisy, indeed must not.  You must feel that this is legitimate and practical, because the thoughts of plenty will automatically begin to attract plenty.  This is sufficient.  There should not be an overemphasis on material possessions or security however.

Now this program if faithfully followed will bring results.  It will initiate intuitive concepts, ideas in your work which will automatically attract others to possess them.  It will initiate other actions that will result in financial betterment.

Do you have any questions pertaining to this particular material?

(“I have a lot of them.  It’s hard to ask them all at once on short notice though.”)

Part of your attitude is a result of your family situation and of identification with the past.

(“I know it.  And I’m tired of it, too.”)

Still the old feeling, always an excuse, that poverty is pure and more virtuous.  Now.  An overemphasis on financial matters is indeed detrimental, but if you are worrying about money you are as overly concerned with it as any miser.

(“I’d like to forget all about it.”)

If you could then this would also be much more effective than your present course.

(“I keep telling myself to forget it.”)

Now I am telling you to forget it.  I have told you that you will never be in severe financial difficulties again, but you do not trust my word enough, so far.  You must instead insist upon watching every dollar in the bank, and fearing it will dwindle away.  And then of course it does, and you think that the physical circumstances certainly justify your attitude.  But your attitude caused the circumstances.

(“My attitude alone?”  This I could not believer.)

Your attitude in the main of late.

(“How about the dwindling attendance at the ESP classes?”)

Ruburt maintained this fairly well.  You own worries have been causing some difficulties here.

(“Why can’t his positive attitude override my poor one then?”)

On occasion it does indeed.  Or he would not have any students left.  I mean that literally, since in the beginning particularly you did not believe that any would last for any period of time.  He does indeed have the ability to attract money, though in the past he was not able to use this ability.  He is only now learning to do so, and free enough to do so.  Your combined abilities will serve you well here, if you follow my advice.

(“I’m not absolving myself, or trying to, but I find it hard to believe that I am the only one involved here.”)

I did not say that you were, but only that Ruburt has been making an attempt in the proper direction, and you have not been able so far to make the same attempt.

(“For some time I’ve felt alone in this deal.”)

You felt alone because you felt you were worrying alone.  Ruburt has for at least two years been actively concerned, very actively.  He has attempted however to give the impression of not worrying, and to constructively think in terms of plenty.

Whenever you mentioned a particular bill even in passing, he has immediately imagined it paid and given himself directions so that the funds would be obtained.  When your rent was first raised within two weeks he had four new students using this method.

(“Does he still have them?”)

He has two of them.

(“Why does he have less students than ever, then?”)

Because he does not have less than ever.  He has less than he did at the time.

(“That’s what I mean, I guess.”)

This was because of the interaction with your own attitude.  Give us a moment.  You think in terms of wealth and sensuousness.  Wealth as opposed to art or aesthetics.  Your father disliked his brother who was wealthy.  To have money is therefore a betrayal of your father.

Since your mother pushed your father to make money, then to make money yourself seems an added betrayal toward your father, and seems to ally you with your mother, of whose emotionalism you were always frightened.  To you wealth is in some strange way connected with the feeling you have toward using oil as a medium.

(“I’m getting over that.”  And am grimly determined, too.)

It was not safe, too rich and smothering, like gravy that you also dislike.

(“I’ve become quite mad at my parents in the last year or two.”)

Now these connections should help you.  The inner resistance to these ideas I am presenting should to some extent vanish as you reread the session.  Your own abilities as a creator are extremely strong, your powers of imagery brilliant.  Now in the financial realm you have been using them against yourself.

I would have come out more strongly in this regard in the past but Ruburt would not permit it.  Now he does.  Your combined abilities can directly change your material status.  Do you have a question?

(“I used to find it quite irritating when Jane passed it off when I mentioned bills.”)

He is, as you know, more than usually or normally attentive and sensitive to your remarks.  He has always been much more concerned about financial affairs than you realize.  There has been what you may call a natural misunderstanding here.  But I tell you that in each of these cases he was attempting to offset your negative attitude, and to use his abilities in the way he intuitively realized he could, to help matters.

On his part in the past years this was subconscious.  He did not realize consciously what he was doing, but was strongly impelled to take the stand that he did, and outraged subconsciously that you did no understand why he took it.

(“Probably because I didn’t see any concrete results.”)

You did not look for them, and you denied and of course did not see them.

(“I mean things like additional money.”)

I know exactly what you mean.  You negated them.

(“Why didn’t he negate my attitude?”)

Because at the time, in those days, particularly consciously, he would not permit himself to.  He was not sure enough.  He was working on hunches, to him, and he always followed whatever suggestions you made.  He had his own background also, and he was afraid of being successful.  These feelings allowed him to follow along with you.

(“That’s why I’m harping on this point that I’m not alone in this deal.”)

I am trying to get you out of this deal.

(“I’m willing.”)

The fact remains that you have in the recent past not attempted to project thoughts of plenty, and Ruburt has.

(“I am fully aware of that.”)

Your combined efforts can change your situation.

(“Yes, I believe they can.  I haven’t felt that we’ve been using any combined efforts particularly.”)

My dear friend - 

(“Yes?”)

- you are defensive, because you realize too well now the effect of your negative thoughts in this direction.  The extent of your reaction should tell you this.

(“Yes, I agree.”)

You do not need to banish the thought of money for you have not been concerned with money, but with the lack of money.  You have thought of your dwindling bank account, and I tell you that this is why your bank account is dwindling.  The material is not distorted.  If you must think of your bank account –

(“I’d rather not.”)

- then make all efforts to imagine in your mind those figures you wish there.

(“I don’t have any.”)

Settle on a reasonable amount.  See them in your mind as your balance, and following Maltz you will then feel those emotions suitably connected with the desired amount.  This is what you have not accepted.

(“I’d rather think about painting pictures, I guess.”)

Whenever you find yourself thinking of your bank account follow the exercise I have just given you.  I am not suggesting that you take the time out.  I am suggesting that you devote the same amount of time constructively that you are now spending destructively, and that the new exercises take the place of the old automatically followed negative exercises that you have indeed been faithfully following.

Simply this.  Whenever you catch yourself in the old worries, remind yourself of this session, and immediately substitute one of the minute and simple exercises I have provided.  You do not have to kneel down before a money god two hours a day.

For all of your objections Ruburt has studiously taken 15 or 20 minutes a day in what he rightly believes to be practical exercises to better your financial condition.  He has had enough success spasmodically to know that the exercises work.

When you have done the same, speak to me again on these matters.  I have not been placing any blame on anyone.  I thought I was explaining the simple mechanics involved.  In other words you protest too loudly.

(“I never used to say anything.  I thought speaking up was a step in the right direction.”)

It is indeed.  I will also answer you now, which is a step in the right direction.  Joseph, it is simple.  You do have control over your thoughts if you will but exert it.

(“I agree with that.”)

Thoughts of plenty will bring you plenty in material and financial terms, and in other terms.  Thoughts of want will produce want.  I have not made these rules.  When you think in terms of want, and then see physical materializations of want, you are tempted to think that your fears were justified, and therefore those thoughts are reinforced.  But the thoughts caused the want, and I am simply trying to help you stop that cycle.  Now, if you and Ruburt could agree on the sort of home you would like, and if you dreamed of it and thought about it specifically, you would have it.

Again, this does not involve anything extra.  Instead if you find yourself thinking consciously about the limitations of your apartment, you would then substitute an image of this home, you would automatically be bettering your condition rather than maintaining it.

Now I speak, as you well know, for your own benefit.  If you have questions ask them.

(“No, I guess I just felt I was alone in the deal.”)

You were not indeed, far from it.  From the time you purchased your car Ruburt has daily done exercises to lead toward its payment.  Whenever your rent has been raised he has done the same, and any outstanding bill for the last six months has met the same treatment.  Before this he made subconscious efforts that he felt you did not understand.

(“He didn’t say anything about it.”)

He felt that to open the subject was disastrous to him, for he could not explain, and he did not know consciously how to explain.  This is one of the reasons why I chose this subject this evening.  Do you have questions?

(“No, I guess not.”)

Your own visual abilities are often used subconsciously.  They are stronger than Ruburt’s.  He must work for his.  Therefore your subconscious negative imagery has on many occasions superseded.  You must realize if you can that no blame is intended here.  You would be even better off if you could forget the whole issue.

(“I’d like to.  I try.”)

Since you are however so strongly concerned with it these exercises will be of great benefit.  I will give you a particular example here.  Now Ruburt in his exercises has been imagining vividly his dream book sold, selling.  While you have been imagining the dwindling accounts and pessimistically thinking that after all the book may not sell, and to be practical you cannot be sure that the outline will sell and your efforts therefore have been knocking each other out.

Your thoughts are the reality.  Do you have questions?  You may indeed speak up.

(“No, I guess not.  I can’t think of anything.”)

You may pile them up for me at your next session.

(“Is trying to forget about the whole bit the best course?”)

The point is to let, permit, allow yourself to forget, not force.

(“That is what I mean.”)

You must allow yourself to think naturally, and thoughts of plenty will flow.  You should not ideally have to do any exercises.  They are to counter the negative exercises that you are doing.

(“I know it.”)

What you should do, you see, is simply trust, for this is the practical point of it all.

(“Yes.”)

I cannot stress too strongly however the main points I have made tonight.  Give me a moment.

Now, from your own experience, when Ruburt and you are in a condition of positive love, you see, do you sense the inner feeling of abundance?

(“Yes.”)

This is to some extent of the same nature.  That feeling of abundance and trust will in itself bring you plenty and abundance.  It will attract intuitive ideas on your part, and intuitive actions on the part of others.  Indeed Ruburt read an article this afternoon on brain waves, but I tell you that you send out messages of abundance or want.

Now do not short change yourself.  This trust is the basis of your existence.  You have much that others more financially secure would envy, and do envy.  You have projected those thoughts directing to yourself that which means most to you.  Do not ignore what you have.  The point is that in this one area you have felt insecure for various reasons, afraid to possess money.

Understanding will help you.  The exercises I have given you in themselves will begin to negate the causes behind this failure.  Do you see?

(“Yes.”)

(“Did you hear me earlier, when I said I’d been mad at my parents for some time now?”)

I did indeed; and anger will not help you, nor resentment.

(“I don’t think I could have really escaped some of that, though.”)

You could not have.  The point is, if you see yourself as financially independent and of abundant means, this will come to pass and regardless of your parents.  They will be well cared for.  Burdens will drop from your shoulders when you begin to see yourself unburdened.

(“Okay.”)

Now I have tried to help you this evening, and I hope that I have done so.

What To Ask For

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 403

What To Ask For

You must want what is best for your own development and the development of others rather than specifically determining what you think consciously is better for you and then trying to force or coerce fate to get this for you.  If want what is best for your own development and what is best for the development of others, then you shall attain it.  It shall come to you effortlessly.  I am leading up to certain issues here.  You are not always aware of what is best for you on a conscious level.  Often the person that you think you want or need is not the person you want or need on other levels.  When you drive your car you often attempt to speed through reality as quickly as you can, and you are pleased with yourself as the driver of the vehicle.  You like driving because you feel that it gets you where you want to go and quickly, and you do not mind breaking a few small rules of the road in the process.  Now the small rules that you break, are indeed, minute ones.  It is not that you break a specific rule; it is the attitude that allows you to break the rule; and this applies to other roads beside the physical highway.  You want to get to your destination too quickly.  The destination is within you.  You do not have to go any place to get to that destination; and it is only when you think that that destination lies elsewhere that you allow yourself to go astray.  Your identity is within you and do not look for it in others.  This is perhaps the strongest point of my message to you this evening, the one I would have you take to heart.  When you realize that your own identity is within, you will not spend energy seeking to find yourself in others.  Others cannot give you a sense of worth; this is your own.  Any lack is your own lack.

…  Now, you have learned a good deal, and I know that you have tried.  It does no good to understand issues intellectually, however, or even to understand them intuitively unless you understand them so thoroughly that they become a part of your daily life.  Much that you know you have made a part of your life, but you still wish to use your knowledge for your own conscious purposes.  You are still not willing to say let me develop as I should develop.  You are still saying let me develop as I think I should develop.  The I being a highly egotistical I.  You are still saying, let me develop as I want to develop.  You are still saying I want this person or I want that person or that thing.  Therefore shall I use this ability and this knowledge to gain it.  And that is why you have given yourself a traffic ticket now and then.  What you are learning is a technique for self-development.  You cannot use it, therefore, to attain those things that do not pertain to your own self-development and the techniques will not help you get something that you were not meant to have nor that you have before decided as an entity that you should not have.  …  Nevertheless, the facts remain that your own inner self and your own entity have given you challenges that you have accepted.  Now you know these challenges; subconsciously you are aware of them.  Consciously you do not want to accept them and this is one reason why you have had difficulty with the pendulum.  This is not out of the ordinary.  This happens to many personalities.  It is nothing to blame yourself for.  You are certainly in the midst of a certain line of development.  You cannot blame yourself for not being further along the line.  The very fact that you are here this evening, the very fact that you are trying as hard as you have been shows that you are indeed developing and that you are indeed learning.  There must be an open-minded, an open-hearted attitude here.  You must not try to use what you have learned in a narrow, limiting way.  This hampers your own development.  It closes your eyes to many possibilities that will be important to you.  It is natural, perhaps, to want to use what you have learned, this information, as a technique to achieve what you at any particular time think desirable, a particular person, a particular thing.  But what is important is the inner development.  If this is taken care of, it will automatically lead you to the person that is best for you and to the circumstances that will help you develop.  To insist that a specific individual or a specific goal be attained through these methods is limiting.  There must always be the acknowledgement that you do not consciously as yet realize the depths of yourself, the goals you have set and the challenges, and this material should be used to open up your inner horizons and to lead you in those directions toward which your inner self has already set you.  If you then egotistically, say “No, this particular situation is what I want”, then you may be blocking the inner direction which has been meant for you.

Seth's Artistic Advice to Rob Butts (2)

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 401

Seth’s Artistic Advice To Rob Butts (2)

Now.  Sketching freely outdoors will allow you freedom that will be beneficial.

It is easier then to sense and feel the alive energy within and beneath the physical forms that you see.  It is easier to feel yourself as the artist, also a part of the landscape that you paint; to sense the merging of your own energy into the scene before you, and to realize that you are a part of it also.  For you paint reality from within.

You cannot step outside it for a better view.  It is easier to realize that the vision and the ever-alive energy are far more permanent than the forms.  The permanency and the timeless quality do not belong to the shapes of the mountains and the trees, but to the conscious energy that forms them.

You as artist, symbolically speaking, should not step backward to see the landscape more clearly, but step into it so that you can feel it more clearly.  If you sense the peculiar and overall gestalt that is beneath the form at any given time, then creation of the form will follow naturally and truly.

The form is caused by a characteristic condition of the energy at any given time.  If you are intuitively aware of that miraculous neatness, if you allow yourself to be enveloped within that particular moment point, then the painting will form itself about you in somewhat the same manner that I am formed about Ruburt’s voice.  But your painting of course will be more visible.

You should in any case whenever possible sketch outdoors, for you are personally renewed by such an encounter, and the implications are very different.  When you are outdoors sketching there is before you a large expanse.  It is easier to think in terms of size and expansion.  Thoughts of expansion will help your work, so that the energy and vision are not imprisoned by form but are within form, even while in the process of change.

When you are sketching outdoors, as a helpful exercise I suggest the following: attach your focus of attention to one small thing.  It may be a flower or a stone.  Something however that catches your own eye.  Imagine the energy within that object perpetual, but in terms of being endlessly alive and vital.

Pretend that the energy within that object is the center of life, so that the whole rest of the universe derives its energy within that stone or flower.  Do this until you can feel that energy pulsate within the form of the object, so that the form itself is ever mobile while it retains the semblance, as in a stone, of immobility.

Think of the energy as radiating outward from the object, giving life to all other things, whether or not any specific objects are to be in any given painting.  This will result in paintings in which your chosen point of attention radiates through the form, illuminating all other objects in the painting, and psychically radiating outward from the painting.

It will automatically be evocative of other objects not in the painting, and will automatically remind the viewer of the universe that you did not paint.  Expansiveness is built in psychically in this manner.

I believe that some Spanish artists in the past utilized this same sort of idea.

Now in other ways it was also utilized by your old masters.  The expansiveness then was also of a spiritual nature.  Whatever objects were shown in the painting automatically presupposed the existence of spiritual realities, and other universes, though these presuppositions were highly ritualistic.

The meaning behind them was known to all.  Each of the great masters’ paintings somehow suggests the existence of far greater realities, of which the paintings were a part.  They saw the objects within their paintings as portions of a greater whole that was suggested by the painting.

Now the suggestions I have given you is the same sort of thing.  There is no dependence upon agreed ritualistic symbol, however.  The exercise itself will allow you to make the necessary transformation, where the one becomes all.  Now this is the expansion of which I am speaking.  It will cause immediate physical evocative reactions.

The timeless quality will be built in, for the painting itself, though flawless in form, will suggest the changing quality of form, and stress the permanent quality that gives it its meaning.  If you as artist are also aware that the same energy that fills the form that you paint also forms your own image, then the transformation into something better than excellent art is made.

Now the energy can be best suggested by transparents, rather than opaques, for the opaques are too ponderous.  The opaques can be used effectively to suggest the form, superimposed lightly over the transparent energy, but never with a heavy hand.

A good use of transparents in oils will make you more pleased with using them.  Movement can be best portrayed also with transparents, and even for rocks.  While opaques may be used to suggest the physical heaviness, transparents should be used also to show that in actuality rocks are as light as air, and to hint at the ever-mobile energy that forms them.

Now again, much of this has to do with your own interest.  Opaques are excellent to suggest a heavy or dark mood.  In portraits, while the inner skeletal structure must be hinted at, still there should be the suggestion of the personality going beyond the image, and of the personality’s energy radiating outward.

In a portrait, do the same exercise as given earlier.  Imagine the individual as the center of all life, so that when the painting is completed it automatically suggests the whole universe of which the individual is part.  Nothing exists in isolation, and this is the secret that the old masters knew so well.

In the smallest detail of the smallest still life they managed to suggest the reality of the spiritual universe, of which that detail was a part, and through which the energy of the universe spoke.

To use your talents, and they are considerable, you can do no less.

Painting or sketching outdoors for a while will aid you considerably in your ability to sense this inner unity, to see each natural object in its individualistic momentary majesty, and yet to realize that it is in one way a center through which all energy moves.

In itself an object should be then felt as its unique identity, and as a part of the whole universe.  A stone or a flower is a very small thing.  When you attach your attention say to a flower, it is not only a matter of imagining yourself as the flower, or trying to sense what a flower is.  It is also to imagine the power of the energy that causes the flower to grow; and yet in a landscape you will have perhaps many flowers.  They must each suggest the reality of the overall pulsating vitality that makes their appearance possible.

Now oils themselves suggest the earth.  The medium is a fairly natural one.  Let the medium then stand for and represent the physical appearance of permanency in any object, the physical continuity of any given human form in a painting.  Let transparents represent the constant renewal of energy that always escapes the form.  These lift the medium itself into another realm, and the two together can suit your purposes well.

Now one other small point.

An apple can do more in a painting than stand for the spirit of all apples, though that is an accomplishment.  An apple can imply, through use of the exercise I have given you, the whole unseen universe, though not another object is shown in the painting itself.

With oils again the transparents for the mobility and vitality that gives the form meaning, the opaques to suggest the idea of physical time, and to suggest the apparent duration of form.

…  Energy fills out the sails of form.  The energy is psychic and spiritual.  It will endure as long as there are people to look at paintings.  If you can suggest this, and you can, Joseph, then you will truly fulfill your artistic abilities.  To some extent you have been trapped by the object, trying so hard to identify with it that this kind of expansion was not possible.

The skin of the apple must also give the feeling that it is more than an enclosure, for through it energy from the sun also comes.  While it seems solid it is open, and connected with the rest of the universe.  An apple in a room goes out into that room.

An apple is not stuck within a tight hole of space, you see, isolated there.  It makes itself out of space, transforms space, into an apple, and this you must suggest.

Now, some of my suggestions for you this evening come from better sources than I.  For as you know I am no artist.

This has something to do with Ruburt’s difficulty in breaking the trance state.  From someone else here …  Your figures, to get the feeling of depth and breadth, this is not to get the feeling simply of the flesh and bone within the flesh, but to suggest the personal energy and vitality that is in a riot, to be loose within the flesh.

This is from an artist who always used siennas for initial flesh tones, with a suggestion very lightly of violets.  Built up then cleverly with transparent ochre which he had, and a particular green, muted.  The top complexion tone lay on this lightly, as if the wind could blow it away, and of course he suggests this.

(“Can you give me his name?”)

We are working on it.  Van Elder.  Dane or Norwegian, domestic scenes, 1700’s.  Straggly grass scenes and small mounds of ground, brownish foregrounds.  I am not sure, 1781, or 1881 …

(“Representing what?”)

Having to do with him.  Now as the clouds’ construction constantly changes – tonight you watched them so the forms of objects constantly change. 

Seth's Artistic Advice to Rob Butts

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 400

Seth’s Artistic Advice To Rob Butts

For you (pointing to me) always there has been a love of land, and the fruits of the land.

(An obvious connection I had never consciously made; since I enjoy using apples, oranges, fruits, eggs, etc., for models.)

You deal with emotion and creativity, and have always done so.  Your own ability as a draftsman, if the term is the correct one – your technical ability – was adopted for two reasons.

It was a tool of your art.  It was also a part of your talent.  It added to the dimension of your work, but to some degree it was also adopted as a protective mechanism, to give you some feeling of separation.  Your mother’s emotionalism frightened you so that you distrusted strong feeling, even while you must use it, and be vividly aware of it in order to paint.

In this life therefore this high technical ability allowed you to paint, for without it you would have been too frightened of the inner sensibilities necessary.  It has always had these two meanings for you, these two faces.

The precise delineation helped create the subject of the painting beautifully, with almost “supernatural” precision.  Yet the lines also served to protect you from that which you were painting, and from the feeling involved.

It allowed you to feel that you were capturing the subject, and to assure yourself that the subject was not capturing you.  You wanted to be sure that you were using your emotions or feelings and not that they were using you.

The realism has several significant meanings for you also.  Your mother felt literally trapped by physical life and circumstances.  As a youngster you felt that recreating portions of physical reality gave you a mastery and control over them.  The more precise and faithful the recreation, the more complete the mastery.

The emotionalism within the household seemed to be threatening, and in a free form.  You never knew when it would erupt, and as a child you felt helpless before it.  Through precise renderings you felt that you imprisoned it, and therefore controlled it.  In the beginning this had quite magical connotations for you.  Basically you have felt this magical commitment to realistic work, for to leave it would be to break the lines of this imprisonment, letting loose the emotions that you feared.

In the beginning you could not have painted if you had not allowed yourself to develop this technique, which allowed you to use emotion and yet contain it.  These elements helped form and define your abilities, adding to their particular and peculiar nature.

You are recognizing certain limitations that these developments put upon you.  The inner attitudes must be completely changed, though your methods and styles need not necessarily change one iota.  It would help you however to attempt larger work.  You are afraid of tackling too much feeling at once, and the mere fact of working larger would free you from this to some considerable extent.

At times you have been afraid of putting too much of yourself in your work, as if the painting then could imprison you.  In the back of your mind you thought of your mother and father, imprisoned in their house.  The house an emotional framework, but quite physical.

The technique can follow beautifully through as a handmaiden of the intuitions.  The technique can be channels of line through which feeling may flow.  Let the medium and technique follow naturally from the original vision.  Allow the vision then to take its own form.  But do not impose a form upon it.  Then this fine technique will be truly used to advantage.

Imagine the vision on the board, forming itself and evolving outward into physical reality, and let your fine technical abilities simply help the vision flow outward.

Imagine the inner vision flowing through your mind outward freely onto your board.  Then let your flawless technique follow the vision, and on occasion help define it.

This attitude alone will help you greatly.  A child develops in his own way.  A parent should not try to force, but follow the child’s natural bents.  So let your technical ability follow the vision’s natural bents.

Your feeling toward oil – you like it because you consider it basic and powerful; and for the same reason you have also not wanted to use it, resenting its personal connotations to you of raw emotion.

You did not consider it refined, in terms of process, enough.  Neither did you find yourself at home however with the acrylics, that you felt were over-refined, and too far away from basics.  Your problem being your overall attitude toward the emotion from which your art springs, for your attitude is then projected outward upon your mediums.  To some extent the present dilemma was initiated by your parent’s condition.

There is a feeling that emotion is formlessness.

Now freedom, a sense of freedom, has been emerging, which has led you toward a desire for larger work.  Let the vision in your mind emerge naturally, and it will expand and grow.

Working with subjects that initiate joy within you will also help free you, though you are to some extent frightened even of joy, distrusting it.  Still you will experience freedom when you deal with subjects that are evocative to you, of the joy of life or abundance of nature.

Inner visions of a psychic nature also give you freedom, since strangely enough your background did not give you any particular fear in that regard.  There is no personal tie up with the early distrust of fantasy.

Now in portrait work, looking at a subject easily for example, try to see him as he was in past lives.  This will add depth and dimension and vastly increase your own interest.  Now form is extremely important, but forms change constantly, and no form is permanent.  Therefore let your fine draftsman’s ability carry in itself that message: beautiful form but already in transition, with the vision beneath ever ready to adopt new shape.

Think first in terms of being yourself a medium, through which visions flow.  They will each to some degree suggest their own forms which you can faithfully follow.  Do not try consciously to settle upon any given medium, oil, et cetera, or consciously try to set up a lifetime program, in those terms, now.

The developments will come naturally from within, following the general trend followed by these inner visions.  Because you are you, you will attract your own unique visions, and if you follow these suggestions each vision will indicate its form and medium, and the general pattern of these will then be seen to be following along certain lines.

These lines – I mean directions – overall, will give you your uniquely original style.  You will not be forcing yourself along certain lines, nor trying to mold a pattern upon yourself from without.  The original style and so forth, the original slant and direction that you seek, will be the result of your own inner vision freely followed according to the suggestions I have tried to give you.  It already exists and is apparent in some of your work.

Some of this is habitual.  You have freed yourself to some considerable extent already, but you must remember to give your vision its own freedom and then follow it.

Now.  Again, the vision will imply and even sometimes dictate its own form, but the form should always exist as an attribute of the vision and not be imposed upon it.

Therefore concern yourself with the vision and the other matters will take care of themselves.  The vision must always be allowed freedom, for it is greater than its form.  That is important.  The vision shapes itself.  Let your hand follow your intuitions then, and the form will be seen to vibrate, for then the form and the vision are one.

The vision will take another form, but if you have faithfully followed through, then the vision and its adopted form become on moment point.  Allow the vision to express itself in form; again, do not attempt to impose the form upon the vision.  The form should grow out of the vision.

You will, quote, “pick up” visions that no one else can.  If you are a channel for these, your development is assured.  All of this presupposes of course the kind of technical training and background, and knowledge of the art necessary.  This you have.  So as Ruburt (Jane Roberts) is to try to be a channel, so think of yourself in those terms.

The vision that comes to you or through you has been automatically processed as it comes through.  This automatic processing is highly individual, and is what you do as a creator.  The vision comes seemingly from without.  As a creator you translate it into physical terms.

Now the change in the colors represented a sort of poltergeist activity on your part.

(Concerning the fading of colors in my temperas.)

A rather random activity in this case.  Initiated in part by your parents’ situation, and in pure annoyance at the dilemma we have been discussing.

Your materials must always serve your inner vision or you will be dissatisfied with them.  You must be bold in following the inner vision, free enough to follow it.  You have been somewhat hampered by your father’s over cautiousness and timidity.  This can be resolved however.

When you paint the land, do so thinking in terms having to do with its past as well as present and future.  Its inner development that has resulted in its present form, the energy behind the form.  Remember in your painting the relationship of one object to another, not in terms of space necessarily, the interrelationship of the vitality that forms the objects; the vibrating always changing reality within, say, the skin of the apple or the orange, the quite living consciousness within the molecules that make up what seems to be the solid surface of the fruit’s skin.

This is realism.  Realism is more than the surface of things.

The tempera has been important as a resting place for you in the dilemma.

Stop thinking in terms of the medium, then, let each vision suggest its own.