“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many of you keep searching for some seemingly remote spiritual inner self that you can trust and look to for help and support, but all the while you distrust the familiar self with which you have such intimate contact. You set up divisions between portions of the self that are unnecessary.

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.

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.

(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.

(Pause at 10:07.) I understand that it appears that species have vanished, but again you must remember probabilities, and that those species simply “developed” along the patterns of probable earths. You are not just dealing with a one-line development of matter, but of an unimaginable creativity, in which all versions of your physical world exist, each one quite convinced of its physical nature. There are ramifications quite unspeakable, although in certain states of trance, or with the aid of educated dreaming, you might be able to glimpse the inner complications, the webworks of communications that connect your official earth with other probable ones. You choose your time and focus in physical reality again and again, and the mind holds an inner comprehension of many seemingly mysterious developments involving the species.