“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.

Overall, whether or not you are conscious of it — for some of you are, and some of you are not — your lives do have a certain psychological shape. That shape is formed by your decisions. You make decisions as the result of feeling impulses to do this or that, to perform in one manner or another, in response to both private considerations and in regard to demands seemingly placed upon you by others. In the vast arena of those numberless probabilities open to you, you do of course have some guidelines. Otherwise you would always be in a state of indecision. Your personal impulses provide those guidelines by showing you how best to use probabilities so that you fulfill your own potential to greatest advantage — and [in] so doing, provide constructive help to the society at large.

When you are taught not to trust your impulses you begin to lose your powers of decision, and to whatever extent involved in the circumstances, you begin to lose your sense of power because you are afraid to act.

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).