“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We are back, then, to the matter of the ideal and its actualization. When and how do your impulses affect the world? Again, what is the ideal, the good impulse, and why does it seem that your experience is so far from that ideal that it appears to be evil?

(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.

(10:15.) The job of trying to make the world better seems impossible, for it appears that you have no power, and any small private beneficial actions that you can (underlined) take seem so puny in contrast to this generalized ideal that you dismiss them sardonically, and so you do not try to use your power constructively. You do not begin with your own life, with your own job, or with your own associates. (Louder:) What difference can it make to the world if you are a better salesperson, or plumber, or office worker, or car salesman, for Christ’s sake? What can one person do?

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).

(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.

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair. Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon. They feel powerless, so that many strike out in self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted. They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.

1. Jane originated the key portion of the new title early last Sunday morning, when she got up at 4 A.M. to have breakfast and make some notes for her book. Through the open patio door she listened to the first bird calls, summoning her outside to watch the foggy dawn unfold. She was entranced. “No one else was watching what I watched from my personal viewpoint that morning,” she wrote an hour later. “I felt as if I were being privileged to view a beginning of the world … or of my edge of it.

“Or, I thought suddenly, it was like seeing a new corner of your own psyche, transformed into trees, grass, flowers, sky and fog…. I felt as if I were viewing that part of myself that I’m always pursuing, the part that is as clear-eyed as a child, fleet, at one with its own knowing. That part of us exists apart from our concerns about careers or business, money, fame, the opinion of family, friends, or the world. It’s our direct connection with the universe … from which we emerge in each moment of our lives.