“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: comments concerning several areas. First of all, generally pertaining to yourself. You have been trained, like most of your contemporaries, to deal with an unsafe universe—to hold your own amid tumultuous threats—social, economic, spiritual or otherwise.

Listen to your own conversation. When your friend Leonard comes and speaks of taking time out, you say “I wish I could afford such luxury,” or some such. You think of yourself as virtuous. The idea of not having enough time becomes your badge of virtue, showing that you are hard-working and not “an indolent artist.”

You work at home. You are reacting, and have been, to some of your mother’s attitudes toward men who work at home, so you try to prove to yourself and others that this is really not only as difficult as outside work, but more so. If people might think you have little to do all day because they do not see you going to a job, then you can show that you have even less time to yourself than others.

(9:40.) You have built up the idea of free time being wrong, sinful, no matter what you tell yourself about wanting more of it. That is one thing. Deeper, however, is the fact that the belief in an unsafe universe sets up certain habits of resistance, and more practically, of self-protection. The resistance is protective. It shows itself in fears that seem perfectly realistic, and indeed highly practical—the feeling itself is not let go of easily, for you and others rely upon it. It is a state of alarm and readiness. You are so used to feeling unsafe that you consider alarm of one kind or another as a realistic approach to life.

When you begin to realize that you do indeed live in a safe universe, these patterns of reaction begin to break up. To some extent however as they do you can feel weaponless, or unprotected. Then you read the newspaper and you see that New York City is in great financial difficulty. In a certain way this is almost reassuring, because it correlates with the old habitual belief system that says “Aha, yes, there is a threat. I was right all along.” Thus the older beliefs momentarily feel their old unity, and it is, again, realistic behavior to feel yourself also threatened.

Now our books themselves released their own energy into your world. The ideas were and are needed. Their richness brings about the financial richness, which is as you know assured. It is not virtuous to remind yourself of the poverty of others. In the old line of thinking such a remark would be considered unfeeling. When you dwell upon, for example only, New York’s economic status, you keep the feeling of threat going. In realistic terms this applies to some extent to you and New York City as well. As inappropriate as this might sound, thoughts of your own fortunate financial situation help you increase that abundance—but it also helps to increase the abundance of others.