“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.

Now your ideals, whatever they may be, initially emerge from your inner experience, and this applies to the species as a whole. Your ideas of society and cooperation arise from both a biological and spiritual knowledge given you at birth. Man recognized the importance of groups after observing the animals’ cooperation. Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life. This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help you form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations. You learn from nature always, and you are a part of it always.

(Pause.) Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams. (Intently:) You were born because you had the impulse to be. The universe exists because it had the impulse to be. There was no exterior cosmic Pied Piper, singing magical notes or playing a magical tune, urging the universe into being. The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man or molecule. If you do not trust the nature of your impulses, then you do not trust the nature of your life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of your own being.