“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And good evening to our friend. I do have some remarks for you and I hope that they will be helpful. You must remember to hold your head up. You should know better than to cower when you come here. I have no whip; and I would not use one if I had one. You are not sure enough of your own abilities or of your own worth. You cannot drive through physical life in the same way that you drive your car down the highway. You shall indeed, get traffic tickets and of a different kind, only you yourself give yourself tickets. You cannot force reality to give you what you want. You cannot manipulate events for egotistical purposes. You can manipulate events and you can manipulate them for your own egotistical purposes; but when you do so, you give yourself a traffic ticket. You must want what is best for your own development and the development of others rather than specifically determining what you think consciously is better for you and then trying to force or coerce fate to get this for you. If you want what is best for your own development and what is best for the development of others, then you shall attain it. It shall come to you effortlessly. I am leading up to certain issues here. You are not always aware of what is best for you on a conscious level. Often the person that you think you want or need is not the person you want or need on other levels. When you drive your car you often attempt to speed through reality as quickly as you can, and you are pleased with yourself as the driver of the vehicle. You like driving because you feel that it gets you where you want to go and quickly, and you do not mind breaking a few small rules of the road in the process. Now the small rules that you break, are indeed, minute ones. It is not that you break a specific rule; it is the attitude that allows you to break the rule; and this applies to other roads beside the physical highway. You want to get to your destination too quickly. The destination is within you. You do not have to go any place to get that destination; and it is only when you think that that destination lies elsewhere that you allow yourself to go astray. Your identity is within you and do not look for it in others. This is perhaps the strongest point of my message to you this evening, the one I would have you take to heart. When you realize that your own identity is within you will not spend energy seeking to find yourself in others. Others cannot give you a sense of worth; this is your own. Any lack is your own lack. I may perhaps deal with more specific issues this evening. But I will not discuss them until these points have been made.

Now you have indeed been doing well. And I do congratulate you. You are too impatient both with your own development and the development of others. You want your destination now and you want to get to that destination as quickly as possible, 85-95 miles a minute, you see. You have given yourself several traffic tickets. Now, you have learned a good deal, and I know that you have tried. It does no good to understand issues intellectually, however, or even to understand them intuitively unless you understand them so thoroughly that they become a part of your daily life. Much that you know you have made a part of your life, but you still wish to use your knowledge for your own conscious purposes. You are still not willing to say let me develop as I should develop. You are still saying let me develop as I think I should develop. The I being a highly egotistical I. You are still saying, let me develop as I want to develop. You are still saying I want this person or I want that person or that thing. Therefore shall I use this ability and this knowledge to gain it. And that is why you have given yourself a traffic ticket now and then, What you are learning is a technique for self-development. You cannot use it, therefore, to attain those things that do not pertain to your own self-development and the techniques will not help you get something that you were not meant to have nor that you have before decided as an entity that you should not have. I will leave specifics for later. Nevertheless, the facts remain that your own inner self and your own entity have given you challenges that you have accepted. Now you know these challenges; subconsciously you are aware of them. Consciously you do not want to accept them and this is one reason why you have had difficulty with the pendulum. This is not out of the ordinary. This happens to many personalities. It is nothing to blame yourself for. You are certainly in the midst of a certain line of development. You cannot blame yourself for not being further along the line. The very fact that you are here this evening, the very fact that you are trying as hard as you have been shows that you are indeed developing and that you are indeed learning. There must be an open-minded, an openhearted attitude here. You must not try to use what you have learned in a narrow, limiting way. This hampers your own development. It closes your eyes to many possibilities that will be important to you. It is natural, perhaps, to want to use what you have learned, this information, as a technique to achieve what you at any particular time think desirable, a particular person, a particular thing. But what is important is the inner development. If this is taken care of, it will automatically lead you to the person that is best for you and to the circumstances that will help you develop. To insist that a specific individual or a specific goal be attained through these methods is limiting. There must always be the acknowledgement that you do not consciously as yet realize the depths of yourself, the goals you have set and the challenges, and this material should be used to open up your inner horizons and to lead you in those directions toward which your inner self has already set you. If you then egotistically, say—No—this particular situation is what I want, then you may be blocking the inner direction which has been meant for you. I said I would discuss some particular material and so I shall shortly. But the inner attitude is far more important. I suggest, Joseph, that you take a break and I shall continue.

Now, you fear that I am about to leap down your throat and I can assure you I will not do so. Now your feelings toward me before this session have very much to do with other attitudes that are very important to you and very ingrained. Some of these are obvious and have to do with this life only; others have to do with past lives. Now you have been terrified of your father from the time you were an infant. And before the session began, You thought of me as an old, but wise and extremely powerful male adult, as you thought of your father when you were a child.

([Pat:]I had been terrified of my father for the first 19 years of my life. Indeed, I never saw my father as a person but rather as a dark shadow with a club. My father had a temper that was aimed at us children and at my mother. [Yet my father is a very loving person. I know that now. We are very close, now. I love my father deeply. He has mellowed in his attitude toward my youngest sister, also.] We got spanked when we misbehaved, which is something I’ve always been ashamed to admit to others. I didn’t want my friends to know my father spanked us. I wanted my family to be a happy one. I was always afraid to bring friends home for fear my mother and father might argue and embarrass me. Also, I didn’t think my dad wanted us to bring friends home.

Again this is reflected in the way you drive your car. Now, the difficulties arising from your relationship with your father also gave you other beneficial effects. This feeling is somewhat responsible for your success as a teacher, for example. For you are then in authority, and you would, if you could, drive your students as you drive your car and force them to go 85 miles a minute. You are easier on them than you are on yourself, however, and you make an excellent teacher. In the back of your mind, however, you are always saying—see Daddy, I am doing something well—for this father of yours in your mind is always behind your shoulder watching you and judging you; now this is your attitude that I am describing. You feel that you must be successful or he will punish you, that you must be perfect; therefore you become panic stricken at any sense of failure within you, and you overexaggerate your failings so that you came here tonight to me as if you were two and a half years old. You would not have been at all surprised had Ruburt (Jane) jumped up grabbed a ruler and banged your fingers. Now, a step further, therefore, is that you expect rejection on the part of the male for this reason. Now this only applies to men who are older than you. You are perfectly happy and content with younger males. Give me a moment here.

This attitude of yours places the other individual under very strong psychic pressure. You inflict them with this strong anxiety of yours. They are afraid of saying anything wrong because subconsciously they know that you will exaggerate the slightest movement of the smallest muscle. They become very cautious. Now the information that I have given you this evening should help you to begin to see through this image that until now you have projected upon the males. The information will give you several peepholes through which you may squint and see the individual on the other side of this false image. You can make further inroads through that image. The fact that you have reacted in this manner thus far does not mean that you must continue to do so. In other words you are not fated, you see, to always chase this false image or project it outward. It is not eternal, you have formed it. It has not formed you…

This desire to please your father, to attain perfection has also led you to seek knowledge. It has also given you the drive to develop. It has given you an innate, an intuitive feel toward inner reality. Now do not cry or sniffle. I am not your father giving you an arithmetic lesson. We do not have the time tonight to go into your father’s background which is highly interesting from several viewpoints and has something to do with his attitude toward his daughters. We do not have time to go into too much background on your Dick literature.

Frank Watts liked his cigars. Now you should be able to see. And you can tell Ruburt how directly you have seen that the difference in his attitude affects our sessions.

You must never become so involved within yourself that you ignore the feelings and reality of other human beings, and you must never look at them with the attitude that you are using them for your own development and purposes. And now I am indeed lighting into you, and I am not misinterpreting your inner attitude there.