“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise. When you do not take any steps toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement. You become depressed. You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes. (Pause.) You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities. You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.

None of the unfortunate situations discussed in this book have any power over you, however, if you understand that events do not exist by themselves. All events and situations exist first within the mind. At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.

Give us a moment… There is no civilization, no system of science, art, or philosophy, that did not originate in the mind. When you give lip service to ideas with which you do not agree, you are betraying your own ideals, harming yourself to some extent, and society as well, insofar as you are denying yourself and society the benefit of your own understanding. Each person is an idealist. I simply want to help you practice your idealism in the acts of your daily life.

Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilization as it exists at any given time, in your terms. Be your own best artist. Your thoughts, feelings and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life’s landscape. If you do your best in your own life, then you are indeed helping to improve the quality of all life. Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds. They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man’s livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.

(9:59.) Give us a moment… You will discover the natural, cooperative nature of your impulses, and you will no longer believe that they exist as contradictory or disruptive influences. Your impulses are part of the great multi-action of being. (Pause.) At deeper levels, the impulsive portion of the personality is aware of all actions upon the earth’s surface. You are involved in a cooperative venture, in which your slightest impulse has a greater meaning, and is intimately connected with all other actions. You have the power to change your life and the world for the better, but in doing so you must, again, reevaluate what your ideals are, and the methods that are worthy of them. Science and religion have each contributed much to man’s development. They must also reevaluate their ideals and methods, however.

You will understand, if you are a practicing idealist, that you cannot kill in the name of peace, for if you do so your methods will automatically undermine your ideal. The sacredness of life and spirit are one and the same. You cannot condemn the body without ultimately condemning the soul. You cannot condemn the soul without ultimately condemning the body.

(Long pause.) To some extent you participated in putting a man on the moon, whether or not you had any connection at all with the physical occurrence itself. Your thoughts put a man on the moon as surely as any rocket did. You can become involved now in a new exploration, one in which man’s civilizations and organizations change their course, reflecting his good intents and his ideals. You can do this by seeing to it that each step you personally take is “ideally suited” to the ends you hope to achieve. You will see to it that your methods are ideal.

If you do this, your life will automatically be provided with excitement, natural zest and creativity, and those characteristics will be reflected outward into the social, political, economic, and scientific worlds. This is a challenge more than worth the effort. It is a challenge that I hope each reader will accept. (Pause.) The practical idealist (pause)…. Give us a moment… When all is said and done, there is no other kind.

(“Okay,” I said, teasing her. “You’d better hurry up, though, ’cause he’s already got his next one planned. On dreams, evolution, and value fulfillment — remember? But I should be careful,” I added. “You and your boy might start in on it too soon, and then the joke would be on me.” Somewhat ruefully, I considered all of the work I still had to do to prepare the manuscript of Mass Events for publication.

(While I’m doing my own work on Mass Events we’ll hold the sessions for Seth’s Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, of course. My own long-range goal in working with the Seth books is one that I’ve found very difficult to achieve: I want to catch up on the backlog of work involved with the books so that I can devote most of my efforts to whatever the current Seth book is — while Seth is still producing it. This would certainly be a luxury for me; in my notes for Mass Events I’ve shown how complicated affairs could get for Jane and me when I had to juggle several projects at once over long periods of time.

(And these final notes: We still don’t know whether the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks has been published — but we do know that our good friend Sue Watkins is presently working on Chapter 15 of Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about Jane’s ESP classes. Sue has a few chapters to go, plus some appendix material, and Tam is due to receive her manuscript in January 1980. I also know that as I prepare these notes our 7-month-old kittens, Billy Two and Mitzi, are racing through the house.

(I left my thoughts about Three Mile Island, and began to consider a closing statement about Seth finishing Mass Events as summer passed its zenith and prepared to blend into fall. Then I had it. Of course: The change of seasons meant that while I would be doing my own work on the book, the geese would be flying south. Already I looked forward to their migration, that ancient movement I’ve become especially fond of since we moved into the hill house over four years ago. Through the geese I want to associate Jane’s and my activities with nature rather than technology, for in nature I sense a great, sublime, ultimate peacefulness and creativity that far surpasses technology, can we but ever manage to approach an understanding of what nature really means for us physical creatures. To me, without getting into questions about the magnificent overall originality embodied in All That Is, nature is the basic physical environment which all “living” species jointly create and manipulate within. And my personal, symbolic way of trying to grasp a bit of nature’s ultimate mystery lies in my admiration for the twice-yearly flights of the geese.