“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Life at all levels of activity is propelled to seek ideals, whether of a biological or mental nature. That pursuit automatically gives life its zest and natural sense of excitement and drama. Developing your own abilities, whatever they may be, exploring and expanding your experience of selfhood, gives life a sense of purpose, meaning, and creative excitement — and also adds to the understanding and development of the society and the species.

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.

As you learn to allow your impulses some freedom, you will discover their connection with your own idealized version of what life should be. You will begin to discover that [those spontaneous urges] are as basically good and life-giving as the physical elements of the earth, that provide the impetus for all biological life.

(Pause.) In larger terms, there are really only scientific and religious men and women, however, and fields of science and religion would be meaningless without those individuals who believe in their positions. As those men and women enlarge their definitions of reality, the fields of science and religion must expand. You must be reckless in pursuit of the ideal — reckless enough to insist that each step you take along the way is worthy of that ideal.

I would like each of my readers to be a practicing idealist, and, if you are then you will automatically be tolerant of the beliefs of others. You will not be unkind in the pursuit of your own ideals. You will look upon the world with a sane compassion, with some humor, and you will look for man’s basic good intent. You will find it. It has always been there. You will discover your own basic good intent, and see that it has always been behind all of your actions — even in those least fitted to the pursuit of your private ideals (with gentle irony).

(Pause at 10:17, eyes closed.) Conclusion: You are individuals, yet each of you forms a part of the world’s reality. Consciously, you are usually aware only of your own thoughts, but those thoughts merge with the thoughts of all others in the world. You understand what television is. At other levels, however, you carry a picture of the world’s news, [one] that is “picked up” by signals transmitted by the c-e-l-l-s (spelled) that compose all living matter. When you have an impulse to act, it is your own impulse, yet it is also a part of the world’s action. In those terms, there are inner neurological-like systems that provide constant communication through all of the world’s parts. If you accept the fact that man is basically a good creature, then you allow free, natural motions of your own psychic nature — and that nature springs from your impulses, and not in opposition to them.

(Actually, both of us will continue to be as busy as ever. Jane plans to write an introduction for Mass Events next month, as summer draws to a close. In the meantime she’s occupied with her own latest book, The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, which she started last May under the Heroics title [see the opening notes for the 854th session]. She’s written the first drafts for many of the chapters of the book by now, and has planned most of the rest of them — although she may change any of her work at any time. Now she reminded me that “a lot of God of Jane is written as my own response to stuff Seth gives in Mass Events.” Jane’s editor, Tam Mossman, hasn’t seen any of her new book yet, although he’s well acquainted with it through a series of lengthy telephone exchanges. Jane thinks she may sign the contracts for it later this year — before Christmas, that is. And her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, waits for her to return to work on it.

(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.

(Through all of our personal activities, Jane and I are intensely conscious of the cultural, scientific, artistic, and economic aspects of the world we’ve chosen to live and work in. Each other individual is just as focused in his or her own unique reality, also. Right now, we’re very much aware of all of the good things the people of our world are providing for us and for millions of others, every minute of every day — yet a certain portion of our joint interest in that “outside” world is also directed toward the situation at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us. Four-and-a-half months ago, one of the two nuclear reactors at TMI malfunctioned and came close to a meltdown of its uranium fuel. The whole world was a spectator at the worst accident in the history of our country’s nuclear power program.

(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.