“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your natural athletes, for example, show through their physical expertise certain ideal body conditions. They may personify great agility or strength or power: individual attributes, physical ideals (pause) which are held up to others for their appreciation, and which signify, to whatever extent, abilities inherent in the species itself.

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.

Do the exercises in my book, The Nature of Personal Reality, to discover what conditions of a mental nature, or of psychological origin, are causing you distress. Instead of taking an aspirin for a headache, sit down, breathe quietly, and remind yourself that you are an integral part of the universe. Allow yourself to feel a sense of belonging with nature. Such an exercise can often relieve a headache in no time. But each such experience will allow you to build up a sense of trust in your own body’s processes.

On the other hand, there are many highly gifted people who continually put down their abilities, and are afraid to take one small step toward their expression. If you accept the rightness of your life in the universe, then your ideals will be those in keeping with your nature. They will be fairly easily given expression, so that they add to your own fulfillment and to the development of the society as well.

(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.

(10:01.) Any animal knows better than to distrust the nature of its own life, and so does any infant. Nature exists by virtue of faith. The squirrels gather nuts in the faith that they will have provisions, in the faith that the next season will come, and that spring will follow winter. Your impulses are immersed in the quality called faith, for they urge you into action in the faith [that] the moment for action exists. Your beliefs must interact with your impulses, however, and often they can erode that great natural beneficial spontaneity that impulses can provide.

(Pause.) When I speak of impulses, many of you will automatically think of impulses that appear contradictory or dangerous or “evil” — and that is because you are so convinced of the basic unworthiness of your being. You have every right to question your impulses, to choose among them, to assess them, but you must be aware of them, acknowledge their existence, for they will lead you to your own true nature. This may involve a lengthy journey for some of you, with your belief systems, for many of your impulses now are the result of the pressure caused by perfectly normal unacknowledged ones in the past. But your impulses reflect the basic impulse of your life. Even if they appear contradictory at any given time, overall they will be seen to form constructive patterns toward action that point more clearly towards your own clear path for fulfillment and development.

(Long pause at 10:10.) Natural attributes show themselves quite clearly in early childhood, for example, when you are allowed greater freedom to do what you want to do. As children, some people love to work with words, some with images, some with objects. Some show great ability in dealing with their contemporaries, while others naturally lean toward solitude and private meditations. Look back toward the impulsive behavior of your childhood, toward those activities that mostly pleased you.

For a start you will acknowledge your existence in the framework of nature, and to do that you must recognize the vast cooperative processes that connect each species with each other one. If you truly use your prerogatives as an individual in your country, then you can exert far more power in normal daily living than you do now. Every time you affirm the rightness of your own existence, you help others. Your mental states are part of the planet’s psychic atmosphere.

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.

In your lives, anything you want is possible within the contours of your natures, if only you understand that this is so.