“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“You make your own reality.” That statement is one of the cornerstones of Seth’s material, stated almost from the beginning of our sessions and emphasized throughout his books. In Mass Events, though, Seth goes further, maintaining that our private impulses are meant to provide the impetus for the development of our own abilities in a way that will also contribute to the best interests of the species and the natural world as well. He’s speaking of our normal impulses here, those that we’ve been taught are dangerous, chaotic, and contradictory. Seth maintains that we can’t trust ourselves while distrusting our impulses at the same time. Much of this book is concerned with the purposes of our impulses, and the reasons for their poor reputations in the eyes of science and religion. What Seth is really saying here is that our impulses are meant to help us create our own realities on a personal basis in a way that will enhance both our private lives and our civilizations.

When Seth began this manuscript, I was personally working with the idea of “heroic impulses” (those separate from our usual ones) that would operate as inner impetuses toward constructive action. In this book, though, Seth states that it is our normal everyday impulses that we must learn to trust. Even I was taken back! Our usual impulses? The ones I ignored while I was looking for the “heroic” ones? And finally I began to understand: Our normal impulses are heroic, despite our misunderstanding of them. In a way, this entire book is an introduction to our impulses, those we follow and those we deny.

I’ve had my own hassles with impulses, following only those I thought would lead me where I wanted to go, and drastically cutting down those I feared might distract me from my work. Like many other people, I thought that following my impulses was the least dependable way of achieving any goal — unless I was writing, when impulses of a “creative” kind were most acceptable. I didn’t realize that all impulses were creative. As a result of such beliefs, I’ve had a most annoying arthritis-like condition for some years that was, among other things, the result of cutting down impulses toward physical motion.

In the past, when Seth told me to trust the spontaneous self, I said “Okay,” and imagined some hypothetical inner self somehow apart from my conscious intents. But when Seth kept repeating “Trust your impulses” in this book, I finally got the message through my head — and I’ve already had considerable physical improvement as a result. This distant-seeming inner self wasn’t so distant after all; “it” communicated through my impulses. In a way, impulses are the language of the psyche.

But what about aggressive or contradictory or even murderous impulses? How can those be trusted? Seth answers those questions and many more, until as we read his explanations we wonder how we could have so misread our own nature as to distrust the very messages meant to lead us toward our own spiritual growth and that of the species as well.