“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With many pauses:) Part of the difficulty arises from the current (pause) scientifically-oriented blend of rationalism. It lies in the way in which the individual is defined. As a species, you think of yourselves (pause) as the “pinnacle” end of an evolutionary scale, as if all other entities from the first cell onward somehow existed in a steady line of progression, culminating with animals, and finally with man the reasoning animal. (In parentheses: with all of that progress occurring of course by chance, incidentally.)

The feelings and sensations give rise to the questions, to the thoughts, to the intellect. The child in a fashion feels — feels — its own thoughts rise from a relative psychological invisibility into immediate, vital formation. There is a process there that you have forgotten. The child identifies with its own psychic reality first of all — then discovers its feelings, and claims those, and discovers its thoughts and intellect, and claims those (all quite intently).

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own. They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital. By the time you are an adult, however, you have been taught to disconnect your identity from your feelings as much as possible, and to think of your personhood in terms of your intellectual orientation. Your identity seems to be in your head. Your feelings and your mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory. You try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

(9:27.) You are taught to submerge the very intuitive abilities that the intellect needs to do its proper work — for the intellect must check with the feeling portions of the self for feedback, for support, for knowledge as to biological conditions. Denied that feedback, it can spin on endlessly in frenzied dry runs. (Long pause.) At each moment, from the most microscopic levels the body (pause) in one way or another is ascertaining a constant picture of its position within physical reality. That picture is composed of millions of ever-changing smaller snapshots, as it were — or moving pictures is better — determining so many conditions, positions and relationships that they could never be described. You end up with a predominating picture of reality in any given moment — one that is the result of the activity of psychological, biological, and electromagnetic stratas. One picture is transposed upon the others, and calculations made constantly, so that all of the components that make up physical existence are met, and intersect to give you life.

None of that is the intellect’s concern at an intellectual level. At a biological level, and at an electromagnetic level, the intellect, of course, performs feats that it cannot consciously know through the use of its reason (all intently). Spontaneously, with the process just mentioned, millions of pictures are being taken also of the probable actions that will — or may — be needed, in your terms, in the moment immediately following, from microscopic action to the motion of a muscle, the driving of a car, the reading of a book, or whatever.

(9:46.) Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity¹ — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellects alone, but to enlarge your scopes of identity. Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.

(Pause.) With Ruburt: The new orientation is bringing results, and the results do appear effortlessly.² The affair with Mitzi (one of our cats) did involve action at other levels — a magical orientation. Ruburt is doing well. Have him remember that creative activity goes on within him all of the time, and he is often most active precisely when he is not aware of it. He is only aware of those moments when creative activity surges into his conscious awareness, and by then much of the “work” has already been done.

He is not responsible for other people’s realities, but he is responsible for his own. Give us a moment … .(Pause, eyes closed). The ill woman’s reality does not threaten his own in any way. The situation, however, shows that he sometimes still thinks he should be able to solve all problems, and to know all the reasons for any given sorrow or tragedy. The intellect cannot handle that kind of information at that level.

The reason for the problem is a philosophical concern of Ruburt’s, and of yours, but it is one whose answer — or answers — will gradually unfold. All of this information I consider necessary, again, to provide an overall atmosphere of comprehension that will allow the release of your own vitalities and strengths in an effortless manner, in such a way that your own problems begin to dissolve.