“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(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.

Even the c-e-l-l-s (spelled) are free enough of time and space to hold an intimate framework of being within the present, while being surrounded by this greater knowledge of what you think of as the earth’s past. In greater terms, the earth and all of its species are created in each moment. You wonder what gave life to the first egg or seed, or whatever, and think that an answer to that question would answer most others; for life, you say, was simply passed on from that point.