“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’m just waiting,” Jane said at 9:19, after we’d been sitting for the session for perhaps fifteen minutes. “Come on, Seth, for Christ’s sake,” she said, with unintentional humor. “It really bothers me when I don’t start a session within a reasonable time: I wonder what kind of a block is there, you know….” Then: “I think that right now there’s some material I sense, but it hasn’t fallen into the right slot yet. I just want dictation…. Well, I guess I’m ready….” She was in trance before she laid her glasses on the coffee table between us. Her eyes were very dark now when she stared at me as Seth.)

Now: Dictation.

(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.) 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.

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.

(10:27. Now Seth came through with a couple of paragraphs of material for Jane, here deleted. Then at 10:31:)

(“Yes. Tonight I just did it to do it,” Jane said. “I have sessions now at times when I wouldn’t have bothered to in the past. I was getting stuff from Seth before the session, but I haven’t the slightest idea of what he said in the session itself — I don’t remember anything. But it was good, huh?”)