“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some correspondents write: “I realize that I am too egotistical.” There are many schools for spiritual advancement that teach you to “get rid of the clutter of your impulses and desires,” to shove aside the self that you are in search of a greater idealized version. First of all, the self that you are is ever-changing and never static. There is an inner self in the terms of those definitions, but that inner self, which is the source of your present being, speaks through your impulses. They provide in-built spiritual and biological impetuses toward your most ideal development (underlined). You must trust the self that you are, now.

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.

Again, impulses are inherently good, both spiritually and biologically. They emerge from Framework 2, from the inner self, and they are based on the great inner webwork of communication that exists among all species on your planet. (Pause.) Impulses also provide the natural impetus toward those patterns of behavior that serve you best, so that while certain impulses may bunch up toward physical activity, say, others, seemingly contradictory, will lead toward quiet contemplation, so that overall certain balances are maintained.

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.

If you examine such troublesome stimuli, you will always find that they originally rose after a long process, a process in which you were afraid to take small positive steps toward some ideal. Your own impulses naturally lead you to seek creative fulfillment, the expansion of your consciousness, psychic excursions, and the conscious knowledge and manipulation of your dreams.

(All intently at 9:40:) No methods will work if you are afraid of your own impulses, or of the nature of your own being. Most of you understand that All That Is is within you, that God is within creation, within physical matter, and that “He” does not simply operate as some cosmic director on the outside of reality. You must understand that the spiritual self also exists within the physical self in the same fashion. The inner self is not remote, either — not divorced from your most intimate desires and affairs, but instead communicates through your own smallest gesture, through your smallest ideal.

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.