“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, Ruburt wants me to help him with voice control. You are so used to the image that you have projected outward that you are uncomfortable when you try to face a situation nakedly without the image. You project the image on one specific individual so strongly. You also project it in any of your relationships, as a rule, with men who are older than yourself. You do not want to or had not wanted to face even a transient relationship with a man because you did not then have time, you see, to project this image in any dependable manner. There was also a gap when you would have to face the individual as he was. This made you uncomfortable and defiant because it forced you, however briefly, to meet another individual eye to eye. It goes without saying that you could not see whatever good qualities there were in any man you knew casually. You did not have time to project the image upon him, and you were afraid to see clearly without it. Practice in such relationships would allow you to get used to an environment without this image. If not giant steps, baby steps, each such encounter being a small exercise in seeing another male individual without your image glasses on.

When I spoke of exercises, I meant exercises; but the purpose of the exercise is to enable you to understand others. This is not an exercise for you specifically, for you to use specifically for your own reasons; it must also wholeheartedly involve other people. You are not to use them as exercises; you are to exercise your own abilities so that you can perceive them clearly; for you do not understand their reality unless you do so.