“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Four weeks ago, I wrote in the opening notes for the 854th session that Jane wasn’t sure of Heroics as the title for her new book. She’s been using it ever since, though — until late last night, that is, when she finally agreed that she did have the definitive and very original title that she’d been searching for all along: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. “Is that too daring, too far out?” she asked me. No, I told her, I thought it was an excellent title, and that it said exactly what she wanted the reader to know.¹

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.

(With gentle irony:) No one told it that it was impossible to grow from a tiny cell — change that to a tiny organism instead of a cell — to a complicated adult structure. What tiny, spindly, threadlike, weak legs you all once had in your mother’s wombs! Those legs now climb mountains, stride gigantic boulevards, because they followed their own impulsive shapes. Even the atoms and molecules within them sought out their own most favorable probabilities. And in terms that you do not understand, even those atoms and molecules made their own decisions as the result of recognizing and following those impulsive sparks toward action that are inherent in all consciousness, whatever their statuses in your terms (all with intensity and feeling).

Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development, which also promotes the ideal development of all organizations in which it takes part.

(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?

As the body wants to grow from childhood on, so all of the personality’s abilities want to grow and develop. Each person has his [or her] own ideals, and impulses direct those ideals naturally into their own specific avenues of development — avenues meant to fulfill both the individual and his society. Impulses provide specifications, methods, meanings, definitions. They point toward definite avenues of expression, avenues that will provide the individual with a sense of actualization, natural power, and that will automatically provide feedback, so that the person knows he is impressing his environment for the better.

You may become outraged, scandalized — or worse, filled with self-righteousness, so that you begin to attack all those with whom you do not agree, because you do not know how else to respond to your own ideals, or to your own good intent (with much emphasis).

Yet that is precisely where first of all you must begin to exert yourselves. There, on your jobs and in your associations, are the places where you intersect with the world. Your impulses directly affect the world in those relationships (intently).

On the one hand, they believe that the self is evil, and on the other they are convinced that the self should not be so. They react extravagantly. They often see society as the “enemy” of good. Many — not all, now — criminals possess the same characteristics you ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression. And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.