“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob’s notes provide the necessary exterior orientation for this present volume, as they do for the previous Seth books, and hint at the framework of normal life in which Seth so gallantly “appears” twice weekly, tossing off my glasses and thereby signaling the beginning of my trance. Besides this, of course, my own moods, speculations, joys and sorrows have spun their earthly web through my mind on such days. I may have worked well or poorly at my own writing. The day may have been calm or distracted by unexpected guests, or marked by any of life’s normal domestic ups and downs.

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.