“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The idea of—not perfection, now, but excellence—is presented to consciousness in many ways and in many guises, and the ideal of excellence serves as an impetus for consciousness, an excellence of pattern. The pattern is used as a standard by the individual consciousness. Members of your species are at various stages, and if you ignore stereotypes, historical connotations, then you can see traces of all of the areas of man’s so-called past development now in the present, and also examples of future development. Because of your time concepts and beliefs, the examples from the future even in this exercise will not appear as clearly as those of the past.

(A quick, and probably partial answer: I do not know how much I may have counted upon Jane’s symptoms in the past to furnish a private world in which I could work. If I ever felt this way it was quite hidden from myself. I do think that the point of no return there was passed some time ago—several years, in fact. Now I think that any such benefits as isolation cannot compare with the price paid to achieve such a state. How could watching my wife hobble along possibly be considered a fair price to pay for privacy? The time spent in performing such simple chores as limping down the stairs and out to the car, for example, is far more on a daily basis than any that would be spent chatting with a neighbor, or even visiting, etc. And above all, the symptoms are not worth it to achieve isolation, for ironically the resultant time to work has lost the one ingredient that is important above all: peace of mind in which to carry out the appointed tasks.)