“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) You live surrounded by impulses. You must make innumerable decisions in your lives — must choose careers, mates, cities of residence. Experience can help you make decisions, but you make decisions long before you have years of experience behind you.

Many people in a quandary of indecision write to Ruburt. Such a correspondent might lament, for example: “I do not know what to do, or what direction to follow. I think that I could make music my career. I am musically gifted. On the other hand (pause), I feel a leaning toward psychology. I have not attended to my music lately, since I am so confused. Sometimes I think I could be a teacher. In the meantime, I am meditating and hoping that the answer will come.” (Pause.) Such a person is afraid to trust any one impulse enough to act upon it. All remain equally probable activities. Meditation must be followed by action — and true meditation is action (underlined). Such people are afraid of making decisions, because they are afraid of their own impulses — and some of them can use meditation to dull their impulses, and actually prevent constructive action.

(Pause at 9:45.) “The Ideal, the Individual, Religion, Science, and the Law” (all with some humor and emphasis). That is the heading for our next chapter (9).

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin? Man had laws, however, far earlier. Are laws made then to protect man from his “sinful nature”? (Pause.) If you were all “perfect beings,” would you need laws at all? Do laws define what is unacceptable, or do they hint of some perhaps undifferentiated, barely sensed, more positive issues? Are laws an attempt to limit impulses? Do they represent society’s mass definitions of what behavior is acceptable and what is not?

(Pause.) How does this concern you as an individual? We will start with the individual.

(Pause at 9:59. Then whispering:) Each individual is innately driven by a good intent, however distorted that intent may become, or however twisted the means that may be taken to achieve it.

(Long pause.) Those natural impulses, followed, will automatically lead to political and social organizations that become both tools for individual development and implements for the fulfillment of the society. Impulses then would follow easily, in a smooth motion, from private action to social import. When you are taught to block your impulses, and to distrust them, then your organizations become clogged. You are left with vague idealized feelings of wanting to change the world for the better, for example — but you are denied the personal power of your own impulses that would otherwise help direct that idealism by developing your personal abilities. You are left with an undefined, persisting, even tormenting desire to do good, to change events, but without having any means at your disposal to do so. This leads to lingering frustration, and if your ideals are strong the situation can cause you to feel quite desperate.

(Pause in a forceful delivery.) You may begin to exaggerate the gulf between this generalized ideal and the specific evidences of man’s “greed and corruption” that you see so obviously about you. You may begin to concentrate upon your own lacks, and in your growing sense of dissatisfaction it may seem to you that most men are driven by a complete lack of good intent.

(Pause.) Many of you are convinced that you are not important — and while [each of] you feels that way it will seem that your actions have no effect upon the world. You will purposefully keep your ideals generalized, thus saving yourself from the necessity of acting upon them in the one way open to you: by trusting yourself and your impulses, and impressing those that you meet in daily life with the full validity that is your own.

(10:32 P.M. Jane’s delivery had often been fast and impassioned, even with the indicated pauses. She’s begun to slow up toward session’s end, though. “There’s more there, but I got so I couldn’t get it,” she said, referring to her very relaxed state, which she still enjoyed. “But I feel this generalized material, then Seth zeros in on it specifically. I think that the session tonight was one of those concentrated ones, where you get a lot in a short time….” I told her she’d done well.)