“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.)

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.

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.

(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.

Such action serves as a safeguard so that you do not overemphasize the gaps that may exist in yourself or in society, between the reality and the ideal condition. Many people want to change the world for the better, but that ideal seems so awe-inspiring that they think they can make no headway unless they perform some great acts of daring or heroism, or envision themselves in some political or religious place of power, or promote an uprising or rebellion. The ideal seems so remote and unreachable that, again, sometimes any means, however reprehensible, eventually can seem justified (see Session 850, for example). To change the world for the better, you must begin by changing your own life. There is no other way.

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.

(“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?”)