“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we prepared for the session I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind if Seth commented on a particularly vivid dream I’d had last night. I’d written a detailed account of it upon arising, as I do with all dreams I recall, and Jane had read it as we ate breakfast. I wasn’t sure that she heard me now, though. “I think Seth’s going to add a Part 4 to this book,” she said, “and he’s going to call it ‘The Practicing Idealist.’ And I want to keep changing it to ‘Practicing Idealism,’ because his heading sounds too much like it’s already been used. Wasn’t that a book? I think it might have been written by a political figure, though I’m not sure….”

Give us a moment… Most readers of this book can be considered idealists in one way or another by themselves or others. Yet certainly in these pages we have presented several pictures of social and political realities that are far from ideal. We have tried to outline for you many beliefs that undermine your private integrity as individuals, and contribute to the very definite troubles current in the mass world.

The “laws” of supply and demand are misconceptions based upon a quite uncomplimentary belief in man’s basic greedy nature. In the past you treated the land in your country as if your species, being the “fittest,” had the right to survive at the expense of all other species, and at the expense of the land itself. The ideal of the country was and is an excellent one: the right of each individual to pursue an equitable, worthy existence, with dignity. The means, however, have helped erode that ideal, and the public interpretation of Darwin’s principles was, quite unfortunately, transferred to the economic area, and to the image of man as a political animal.

(Pause.) This is carried through in economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and even the religions. So I would like to reinforce the fact that life is indeed a cooperative venture, and that all the steps taken toward the ideal must of themselves be life-promoting.