“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.”)

Ruburt has been reading old poetry of his own, and he was appalled to find such beliefs in rather brutal, concentrated form. Until our sessions began, he followed the official line of consciousness, and though he railed against those precepts he could find no other solution. The self, so spectacularly alive, seemed equipped with reason to understand the great import of its own certain extinction. Such a tragedy to project upon the living personality.

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.

Another woman [friend] found a small sore spot on her breast. Remembering well the barrage of negative suggestions that passes for preventative medicine — the public service announcements about cancer — she was filled with foreboding. She went to the doctor, who told her he did not believe there was anything wrong. He suggested X-rays, however, “just to be on the safe side,” and so her body was treated to a basically unnecessary dose of radiation in the name of preventative medicine.

I am not suggesting that you do not visit doctors under such situations, because the weight of your negative beliefs about your bodies usually makes it too difficult for you to bear such uncertainties alone. Nevertheless, such actions speak only too loudly of your mass beliefs involving the vulnerability of the self and its flesh.

(Pause.) To me, it is almost inconceivable that, from your position, any of you seriously consider that the existence of your exquisite consciousness can possibly be the result of a conglomeration of chemicals and elements thrown together by a universe accidentally formed, and soon to vanish. So much more evidence is available to you: the order of nature; the creative drama of your dreams, that project your consciousness into other times and places; the very precision with which you spontaneously grow, without knowing how, from a fetus into an adult; the existence of heroic themes and quests and ideals that pervade the life of even the worst scoundrel — these all give evidence of the greater context in which you have your being.