“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Louder, when I asked Seth to repeat a phrase:) I believe that man runs the mile much quicker now (by about 12 seconds) than he did, say, thirty years ago. Has the body’s effective speed suddenly quickened? Hardly. Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted. The body can indeed run faster than the current record (of 3:49). I merely want to show the effect of beliefs upon physical performance. All people do not want to be expert runners, however. Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species. Good, better, best. Is it bad to be a poor runner? Of course not, unless running is your own particular avocation. And if it is, you improve with practice.

Your searches toward understanding excellent performance in any area — your idealisms — are all spiritually and biologically ingrained. If many of the conditions we have mentioned in this book are less than ideal in your society, then you can as an individual begin to change those situations. You do this by accepting the rightness of your own personhood. You do this by discarding ideas of unworthiness and powerlessness, no matter what their sources. You do this by beginning to observe your own impulses, by trusting your own direction. You start wherever you are, today. Period.

You begin by accepting your own worth as a part of the universe, and by granting every other being that same recognition. You begin by honoring life in all of its forms. You begin by changing your thoughts toward your contemporaries, your country, your family, your working companions. If the ideal of loving your neighbor like yourself seems remote, you will at least absolutely refrain from killing your neighbor — and your neighbor is any other person on the face of the planet (louder).

Many of your technological advances — all of them, for that matter — are rather interpretations of the inner mechanisms of nature: sonar, radar, and so forth, as you attempt to physically or objectively reproduce the inner realities of nature. I have mentioned civilizations often before. But it is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations — all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representation. You would have to have additional material, nonverbal, to approach an understanding of such matters.