“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has really made an effort to recognize, study, and follow her impulses since Seth began emphasizing them two sessions ago in Mass Events. She’s become especially conscious of impulses while working on her new book, Heroics, for, strangely, she’s found herself confronting a series of seemingly contradictory impulses to do other things, such as paint, or reread her old poetry.

(For example, she spent Monday and Tuesday reading poetry she’d written before the sessions began [in 1963], wondering why she didn’t have the impulse to work on Heroics instead. Finally, last night she made her intuitive connection: She had been working on the book the entire time. Heroics isn’t to be on how to reach some unattainable superself, but on the barriers that stand in the way of practical self-realization. That old poetry dealt with such impediments. “You can’t find your heroic self unless you trust the self you have,” she told me. “Seth’s been telling us to be alert for negative Freudian and Darwinian beliefs — and suddenly I’m surrounded by my own. And all of those beliefs stand in the way of trusting my impulses. I finally see where the book is headed. I’m going to work out those beliefs for myself and for our readers.”)

Again, you have been taught to believe that impulses are wrong, generally speaking, or at best that they represent messages from a nefarious subconscious, giving voice to dark moods and desires.

You cannot begin to have a true psychology, again, unless you see the living self in a greater context, with greater motives, purposes and meanings than you now assign to it, or for that matter than you assign to nature and its creatures. You have denied many impulses, or programmed others so that they are allowed expression in only certain forms of action. If any of you do (underlined) still believe in the Freudian or Darwinian selves, then you will be leery about impulses to examine your own consciousness, afraid of what murderous debris might be uncovered. I am not speaking merely in hypothetical terms. For example, a well-intentioned woman was here recently. She worried about her overweight condition, and [was] depressed at what she thought of as her lack of discipline in following diets. In her dismay, she visited a psychologist, who told her that her marriage might somehow be part of the problem. The woman said she never went back. She was afraid that she might discover within herself the buried impulse to kill her husband, or to break up the marriage, but she was sure that her overweight condition hid some unfortunate impulse.

(Pause.) Actually the woman’s condition hid her primary impulse: to communicate better with her husband, to ask him for definite expressions of love. Why did he not love her as much as she loved him? She could say it was because she was overweight, after all, for he was always remarking adversely about her fleshy opulence — though he did not use such a sympathetic phrase.

(9:35.) The ideas we have been speaking of, then, are intimately connected with your lives. The man just mentioned denies his personal impulses often. Sometimes he is not even aware of them as far as they involve the expression of affection or love to his wife.

In those areas where you cut down on your impulses, upon their very recognition, you close down probabilities, and prevent new beneficial acts that of themselves would lead you out of your difficulty. You prevent change. But many people fear that any change is detrimental, since they have been taught, after all, that left alone their bodies or their minds or their relationships are bound to deteriorate. Often, therefore, people react to events as if they themselves possessed no impetus to alter them. They live their lives as if they are indeed limited in experience not only to a brief lifetime, but a lifetime in which they are the victims of their chemistry — accidental members of a blighted species that is murderous to its very core.

There would be no psychological avenues to connect my world and yours. There would be no extensions of the self that would allow you to travel such a psychological distance to those thresholds of reality that form my mental environment. If the universe were structured as you have been told, the probability of my existence would be zero as far as you are concerned. There would have been no unofficial roads for Ruburt to follow, to lead him from the official beliefs of his time. He would never have acknowledged the original impulse to speak for me, and my voice would have been unheard in your world.

(Pause.) The probability that this book would ever exist, itself, would have remained unactualized. None of you would be reading it. The mass world is formed as the result of individual impulses. They meet and merge, and form platforms for action.