“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….”

(Pause, then all intently:) Religion and science alike denied other species any real consciousness. When man spoke of the sacredness of life — in his more expansive moods — he referred to human life alone. You are not in competition with other species, nor are you in any natural competition with yourselves. Nor is the natural world in any way the result of competitiveness among species. If that were the case you would have no world at all.

(9:54.) While you believed in competition, then competition became not only a reality but an ideal. Children are taught to compete against each other. The child naturally “competes” against herself or himself (amused) in an urge to outdo old performance with new. Competition, however, has been promoted as the ideal at all levels of activity. It is as if you must look at others to see how you are doing — and when you are taught not to trust your own abilities, then of course you need the opinions of others overmuch. I am not speaking of any playful competition, obviously, but of a determined, rigorous, desperate, sometimes almost deadly competition, in which a person’s value is determined according to the number of individuals he or she has shunted aside.

As I have said before, Ruburt considers summer a time of vacations and beautiful distractions. He does not work well with it. He is afraid that it can lead to laxness. He yearns toward the cool hours, which then become significant.