“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Psychologically, your impulses are as vital to your being as your physical organs are. They are as altruistic, or unselfish, as your physical organs are (intently), and I would like that sentence read several times. And yet each impulse is suited and tailored directly to the individual who feels it. Ideally (underlined), by following your impulses you would feel the shape, the impulsive shape (as Ruburt says) of your life. You would not spend time wondering what your purpose was, for it would make itself known to you, as you perceived the direction in which your natural impulses led, and felt yourself exert power in the world through such actions. Again, impulses are doorways to action, satisfaction, the exertion of natural mental and physical power, the avenue for your private expression — the avenue where your private expression intersects the physical world and impresses it.

(9:49.) Many cults of one kind or another, and many fanatics, seek to divide you from your natural impulses, to impede their expression. They seek to sabotage your belief in your spontaneous being, so that the great power of impulses becomes damned up. Avenues of probabilities are closed bit by bit until you do indeed live — if you follow such precepts — in a closed mental environment, in which it seems you are powerless. It seems you cannot impress the world as you wish, that your ideals must always be stillborn.

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.

It may seem that (underlined) impulsive actions run rampant in society, in cultish behavior, for example, or in the behavior of criminals, or on the part of youth, but such activities show instead the power of impulses denied their natural expression, intensified and focused on the one hand into highly ritualized patterns of behavior, and in other areas denied expression.

(Pause.) A particular idealist believes that the world is headed for disaster, and [that] he is powerless to prevent it. Having denied his impulses, believing them wrong, and having impeded his expression of his own power to affect others, he might, for example, “hear the voice of God.” That voice might tell him to commit any of a number of nefarious actions — to assassinate the enemies that stand in the way of his great ideal — and it might seem to him and to others that he has a natural impulse to kill, and indeed an inner decree from God to do so.

According to conditions, such a person could be a member of a small cult or the head of a nation, a criminal or a national hero, who claims to act with the authority of God. Again, the desire and motivation to act is so strong within each person that it will not be denied, and when it is denied then it can be expressed in a perverted form. Man must not only act, but he must act constructively, and he must feel that he acts for good ends.

The idea [of democracy] expresses the existence of a high idealism — one that demands political and social organizations that are effective to some degree in providing some practical expression of those ideals (emphatically). When those organizations fail and a gulf between idealism and actualized good becomes too great, then such conditions help turn some idealists into fanatics. (Long pause.) Those who follow with great strictness the dictates of either science or religion can switch sides in a moment. The scientist begins tipping tables or whatever, and suddenly disgusted by the limits of scientific knowledge, he turns all of his dedication to what he thinks of as its opposite, or pure intuitive knowledge. Thus, he blocks his reason as fanatically as earlier he blocked his intuitions. The businessman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his ideal of surviving in a competitive world — he suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.