“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said as we sat for tonight’s session, “I don’t have an idea in my head…. I’m just waiting. Come on, Seth….” Nevertheless, we knew that Seth would soon finish Mass Events; he’s been very neatly summing it up in recent sessions.

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.

Your thoughts and beliefs and desires form the events that you view on television. If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better. The new laws would follow.

(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).

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.

(“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.

(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.