“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

However, with this talk of discipline and spontaneity my intention has somewhat changed. For I must tell you again, and I cannot tell you too often, that the inner self, acting spontaneously, automatically shows the discipline that you do not as yet understand. You are not your physical body. You are not your emotions. You have emotions as you have bacon for breakfast. You are not the bacon—and you are not your emotions. You have thoughts as you have eggs for breakfast. You are not the eggs and you are not your thoughts. You are as independent of your thoughts and your emotions as you are of the bacon and the eggs. You use the bacon and the eggs in your physical composition; and you use your emotions and your thoughts in your mental composition. Surely all of you consider yourselves somewhat superior to a piece of bacon, and you do not identify with it. Then, do not identify with your emotions or your thoughts. They flow through you. You attract them in the same way you go to the store to buy your bacon. But the bacon goes through your physical system and the thoughts of emotion, left alone, will pass through your psychic system. And you are independent of them. When you set up barriers and doors, then you enclose these thoughts within you—as if you stored up tons of bacon in your refrigerator and wonder why there was not enough room for anything else.

In the spontaneous working of your nervous system, what do we find? We see here the head of the Dean that rests upon his shoulders and the intellect that demands discipline. And yet all of this rests upon the spontaneous workings of the inner self and the nervous system of which the intellect knows little. And without that spontaneous discipline, there would be no ego to sit upon the shoulders and demand discipline.

Now that I have proven how jovial I am, you may all take a break!

Now all of you—each in your own way—contribute. For you can consider the body of the earth and all that you know—the trees and the seasons and the sky—to some extent as your own contribution—the combination of spontaneity and discipline that gives fruit to the earth.

([Jane:] “I got this fantastic image of everybody spontaneously forming all these seasons and everything. And there was a tremendous effort involved individually to get spring going—to get the buds out...that the good things that we do that we don’t realize...you know we think of war—and we see all the evil we do; and that the good things we do, we often don’t realize—and that we actually form the seasons—the spring, the other seasons; and that the earth itself, the physical earth, is like the Garden of Eden in our subconscious. That is, it’s a result of the good things that we do that we maintain—that we create and maintain this fantastic planet that we get our sustenance and food from—and everything else. And that when spring comes, it’s a creative—a tremendous achievement—on the part of each individual on the earth and in this section of the country, because we have done it. And our belief in spontaneity and life and vitality has actually helped form this. Different chemicals come out through our systems that we don’t even know of that change the atmosphere and so forth and brings all this about. “