“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now unless you come to terms with your own doubts about yourselves then you will have no idea what faith is and when I use the word faith, I am not speaking in religious terms. When you look at your physical reality and see what it is this does not take faith, it is a simple matter of physical perception. When, however, you begin to have glimpses about the nature of reality and realize that you are more than you know that you are now, then it takes faith to bring that inner image close to some actuality, in your terms. You are all hampered, in other words, by doubts. Now your physical perceptions operating alone are often responsible for these doubts for you think you are all that you can see of yourselves, or you think your life is all that you presently perceive of it, and so if you trust in your physical senses alone then you must, indeed, be filled with doubts for you know, instinctively, that you are more than the self that you are presently able to materialize or to give expression to. If you judge yourself according to the physical self that you know, then you must be filled again by doubts because again instinctively, you know that you are more.

Now when you begin to sense the interior invisible self then in physical terms you begin to act upon what you call faith. Belief in that which is not at this point physically real. Faith, however, is not believing in a unreality, it is believing in realities that you cannot, at this point physically, perceive. It is banking on those portions of your own personality that you feel but cannot see in the ordinary mirror. It is banking on the invisible self that, as yet you have not been able to actualize in physical reality. Now each of you in your own way, particularly in the dream state, are intimately acquainted with this invisible portion of yourselves.

Now in world’s terms, you can be a realist and you can say, I am the self that you see and smell and touch. I am the self that I see in the ordinary mirror and that is all, or you can realize that the mirror only captures a small portion of your entire image. That there is far more that is not seen by the mirror, and it is not seen by other eyes and you can choose to bank upon those abilities that you know are inherently your own.

Your criterion for physical reality is physical materialization. You have been brought up to accept that as a criteria for existence and yet each of you instinctively knows that you are far more than this, and those of you here realize it quite well and so you are driven to other than physical means. You are driven to find the reality of yourselves beneath the reality that you know and to do this you must work through the reality that you know and a self that you know. To believe that there is something there to work for is faith. To realize that there is more of yourself than you can physically perceive is faith.

I am not telling you that you should ignore the body. I am not telling you to lose touch with your own feelings or deny them. Your body is your method of perception at this time, but I am telling you that if you identify your entire reality with your body then you are heading for severe feelings of depression and desolation and also letting yourself in for some surprises in the future. You are not imprisoned, as you know, within the form that you wear. Now, there is no reason therefore that you should be imprisoned within it when you are finished with that form.

Each of you in this room can free your own consciousnesses, expand your awareness of identity now, and in your own ways you are beginning to do so. Now in your quiet moments you still identify with the body and think, I am this flesh and I am imprisoned within it and when it is gone then I am done, and these thoughts inhibit your freedom. This will also inhibit you at the time of death for to the extent that you hold them, your emotions will cling to the flesh when instead you should be free of it.

There is a freedom involved in knowing yourself as you are and as you were in your terms, and as you will be in your terms. You can perceive the future as you can perceive the past, again speaking in your terms only. You react to the future today. You simply do not think that you do and you do not connect your actions today with the information that you will perceive tomorrow and so your own reactions escape you.

Now I will give you some information with which you can confound Ruburt at our break. Yesterday, on two occasions, he was quite surprised, but mildly so, to find strong phlegm in his throat. On one occasion he was on the phone to you (Janice) and on another occasion he was in another man’s office. Now he worked with his pendulum and discovered one reason for the phlegm and the cough when he was speaking to you, having to do with the fact that his own writing hours were not done. But he did not search any more deeply than that. Instead, you see, yesterday on two occasions he picked up the fact of his father-in-law’s illness, the phlegm in the father-in-law’s lungs and eschewing heart difficulties. On both of these occasions he reacted physically to information that was psychically perceived and all without recognizing the stimulus or the reason for the physical symptoms.

It does you all good to think for yourselves in class and not have me around telling you how to think of time. Thinking should be your own thing and so should feeling. And while I have been egotistical in many of my lives, I do not need you all to set me up as an authority figure to whom you can relate so I would like to see some freedom on your own parts directed and applied.

Now I am not trying to tell you what to do, I am trying to release the portion of you that knows playfully what to do. You are not to come here each week simply to listen to my deathless prose, for it is not deathless you know, and Ruburt wonders if it is prose. You are to come to release portions of your own reality and then watch yourselves run or fly or soar.

True wisdom, true wisdom, true wisdom does not need thought and true wisdom does not need intellect. Now in the meantime, you will have to get by with thought and intellect because you rely upon it so strongly and there is nothing wrong with it. In the meantime it is an excellent tool but the true wisdom within you, once again, allows your body to spontaneously breathe as you listen to me, refreshes yourselves as you listen to me, collects from realities that you do not perceive, infinite potentials of energy that fill your being as you listen to me. That is wisdom and it does not need words and it formed your intellect. Upon its wisdom your intellect rests and the security of your intellect rests upon that support which is the wisdom of the inner self.

I use words because presently they make sense to you but hopefully behind the words that I speak, you sense the inner vitality which has no need for them and hopefully listening to me, you sense, if only dimly, the wisdom of the self within each of you that is triumphant in its own wisdom, its own spontaneous freewheeling wisdom upon which your intellect rests. The fine and terrible weapon of the intellect should, indeed, terrify even the gods, for there it sits atop of your heads so sure of its function and its worth and its permanence, and its knowledge and it judges everything according to those rules which it has itself established. And so surely should our little idiot flower cower beneath this fine intellect of man that even the seasons themselves should tremble before this fine instrument of the ego. And yet it seems to me, if I remember correctly, that idiot flowers, without a brain in their petals, manage to grow beautifully into what they are and to perfectly do their thing.

But each of the others of you in your own way, still cling to the old methods. You do not really trust yourselves to put these ideas into practice, to trust your lives with them and until you trust your lives with them, you will not see the fruits. The props are beautiful, they are yours and you have created them. And do not ask me what I mean by props for each of you secretly know well what I mean, in your own lives. You must dispense with the props for each one that you hold secretly in your mind holds you back from freedom.

I told you that this was a break and I intentionally left the word props open so that each of you could interpret the ways in which you make and use your own props.

You contact them in a state which is not waking or dreaming. Now this is something that I do not believe any of you understand. You are familiar, to some degree, with your own state of consciousness but you do not examine these too closely. You assume you are awake under certain conditions, and you assume that you are asleep under certain conditions. Now there is, what I can describe as a mean of consciousness, that is a constant between the waking and sleep states. It is yours whether you are awake or asleep and this is the state you are reaching them in.

The last was not a demonstration. I would not put Ruburt through that. He is, however, strongly attuned as far as the father-in-law is concerned and has been for the past week, picking up information. Understand, however, that in your own way you also perceive unconsciously and react to such information, and that many of your unaccountable moods, fears, but also inspirations, have their source in events that, in your terms, have not yet occurred.

Sending energy in his direction will help but he is doing very well on his own. He has consciously already begun to exist in another sphere of reality. Only the body consciousness lingers on.