“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.

Often the insecticide kills more than the mosquito, and its effects can be far-reaching, and possibly have disastrous consequences. However, to consider impulses as chaotic, meaningless — or worse, detrimental to an ordered life — represents a very dangerous attitude indeed; an attempt that causes many of your other problems, an attempt that does often distort the nature of impulses. Each person is fired by the desire to act, and to act beneficially, altruistically (intently), to practically put his stamp, or her stamp, upon the world. When such natural impulses toward action are constantly denied over a period of time, when they are distrusted, when an individual feels in battle with his or her own impulses and shuts down the doors toward probable actions, then that intensity can explode into whatever avenue of escape is still left open.

I am not speaking of anything (pause) like “repression,” as it is used by psychologists, but a far deeper issue: one in which the very self is so distrusted that natural impulses of any kind become suspect. You try to inoculate yourselves against yourselves — a nearly impossible situation, of course. You expect your motives to be selfish because you have been told that they are, and so when you catch yourselves with unkind motives you are almost comforted, because you think that at least you are behaving normally.

When you find yourself with good motives, you distrust them. “Surely,” you think, “beneath this seeming altruism, there must indeed be some nefarious, or at best selfish, motives that escape me.” As a people you are always examining your impulses, and yet you rarely examine the fruits of your intellects.