“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.

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.

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.

(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.