“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many people write requesting that I outline the proper methods for achieving astral projection, for example, or psychic advancement, or spiritual understanding. In its fashion, however, this book is geared to bring about the development of such abilities, for it is not a lack of methods that inhibits such activities. Instead, “psychic progress” is hampered by those very negative beliefs that we have tried to bring to your attention.

If you would know yourself in deepest terms, you must start with your own feelings, emotions, desires, intents and impulses. Spiritual knowledge and psychic wisdom are the natural result of a sense of self-unity.

Some people are only aware of — or largely aware of — impulses toward anger, because they have inhibited those natural impulses toward love that would otherwise temper what seemed to be aggressive desires. When you begin trusting yourselves, you start by taking it for granted that to some extent at least you have not trusted yourself or your impulses in the past: You have thought that impulses were dangerous, disruptive, or even evil. So as you begin to learn self-trust, you acknowledge your impulses. You try them on for size. You see where they lead you by allowing them some freedom. You do not follow urges through that would hurt others physically, or that seem in direct contradiction to your present beliefs — but you do acknowledge them. You do try to discover their source. Behind them you will almost always find an inhibited impulse — or many of them — that motivated you to move in some ideal direction, to seek a love or understanding so idealized in your mind that it seemed impossible to achieve. You are left with the impulse to strike out.

This sense of division within the self forces you to think that there is a remote, spiritual, wise, intuitive inner self, and a bewildered, put-upon, spiritually ignorant, inferior physical self, which happens to be the one you identify with. Many of you believe, moreover, that the physical self’s very nature is evil, that its impulses, left alone, will run in direct opposition to the good of the physical world and society, and fly in the face of the deeper spiritual truths of inner reality. The inner self then becomes so idealized and so remote that by contrast the physical self seems only the more ignorant and flawed. In the face of such beliefs the ideal of psychic development, or astral travel, or spiritual knowledge, or even of sane living, seems so remote as to be impossible. You must, therefore, begin to celebrate your own beings, to look to your own impulses as being the natural connectors between the physical and the nonphysical self. Children trusting their impulses learn to walk, and trusting your impulses, you can find yourselves again.

The impulse to be, in any terms that you can understand, is without beginning or end. What you have in your physical species are the manifestations of inner species of being, or creative groupings originated by consciousness as material patterns into which consciousness then flows. In those terms, the world came into being and the species appeared in a completely different framework of activity than is imagined, and one that cannot be scientifically established — particularly within those boundaries with which science has protected itself.

(Pause.) I am not pleased with those analogies, but sometimes they are all I can use to express issues so outside of normal channels of knowledge. It is as if, then, the earth, with all of its species, existed in complete form as a fully dimensioned cosmic underpainting, which gradually came alive all at once. Birds did not come from reptiles. They were always birds. They expressed a certain kind of consciousness that sought a certain kind of form (all intently). Physically the species appeared — all species appeared — in the same way that you might imagine all of the elements of a highly complicated dream suddenly coming alive with physical properties. Mental images — in those terms, now — existed that “in a flash of cosmic inspiration” were suddenly endowed with full physical manifestation.

But what gives life to the egg or the seed now, keeps it going, provides that energy? Imagining some great big-bang theory (to explain the creation of the universe) gives you an immense explosion of energy, that somehow turns into life but must wear out somewhere along the line — and if that were the case, life would be getting weaker all the time, but it is not. The child is as new and fresh today as a child was 5,000 years ago, and each spring is as new.

(“Do you realize the transformations in belief that would have to take place before this material was even considered by the elite — let alone accepted?” I asked. “It would destroy the world of a scientist who believed in evolution. That is, if he would pay any attention to it to begin with.”