“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a manner of speaking, you must be a practicing (underlined) idealist if you are to remain a true idealist for long. You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones — but you must move (underlined) in the direction of your ideals through action. Otherwise you will feel disillusioned, or powerless, or sure, again, that only drastic, highly unideal methods will ever bring about the achievement of a given ideal state or situation.

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.

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.

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).

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.

I put the concluding statements separate, since I thought they would be more effective that way. (Humorously:) And I bid both of you practicing idealists a fond good evening.

(10:36 P.M. And on that gentle note Seth brought Mass Events to a close. To the end he stayed with his practice of giving book dictation on Wednesday evenings. Jane and I had expected him to finish his work soon, yet when the moment arrived we still felt a certain surprise, a certain nostalgic letdown: Something we’d counted upon as part of our weekly routine wouldn’t be there any more.