“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In more mundane terms, impulses often come from unconscious knowledge, then. This knowledge is spontaneously and automatically received by the energy that composes your body, and then it is processed so that pertinent information applying to you can be taken advantage of. Ideally (underlined), your impulses are always in response to your own best interests — and, again, to the best interests of your world as well. Obviously there is a deep damaging distrust of impulses in the contemporary world, as in your terms there has been throughout the history that you follow. (Pause.) Impulses are spontaneous, and you have been taught not to trust the spontaneous portions of your being, but to rely upon your reason and your intellect — which (amused) both operate, incidentally, quite spontaneously, by the way.

Some of this has been discussed earlier in this book. In the case of the Jonestown tragedy, for example, all doors toward probable effective action seemed closed. Followers had been taught to act against their natural impulses with members of their families. They had been taught not to trust the outside world, and little by little the gap between misguided idealism and an exaggerated version of the world’s evil blocked all doors through which power could be exerted — all doors save one. The desire for suicide is often the last recourse left to frightened people whose natural impulses toward action have been damned up — intensified on the one hand, and yet denied any practical expression.

There is a natural impulse to die on the part of men and animals, but in such circumstances [as we are discussing here] that desire becomes the only impulse that the individual feels able to express, for it seems that all other avenues of expression have become closed. There is much misunderstanding concerning the nature of impulses, so we will discuss them rather thoroughly. I always want to emphasize the importance of individual action, for only the individual can help form organizations that become physical vehicles (intently) for the effective expression of ideals. Only people who trust their spontaneous beings and the altruistic nature of their impulses can be consciously wise enough to choose from a myriad of probable futures the most promising events — for again, impulses take not only [people’s] best interest into consideration, but those of all other species.

How can you trust your impulses when you read, for example, that a man commits a murder because he has a strong impulse to do so, or because the voice of God commanded it? If some of you followed your impulses right now, for example — your first natural ones — it might seem they would be cruel or destructive.