“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because of the nature of your society, a large number of people cultivate what I will call an outside-attuned consciousness. Naturally, sensation and knowledge must of course come through enjoyment and use of the physical body, and through the data received from the physical environment, with which the body must necessarily react.

The outside-attuned consciousness, however, is almost dependent upon exterior stimuli for its sense of life and enjoyment. I do not want to oversimplify, yet such a type of consciousness is far more interested in exploring the nature of itself as it relates to exterior conditions or circumstances. It becomes, relatively now, opaque to subjective personal conditions, since it has no secure exterior framework against which the inner condition can be judged.

I do not want to set up polarities. I do want to give you some background, however, for some of your attitudes. From childhood in your society, you were as children told in one way or another that it was healthy to enjoy sports and outside activity, to join in games, to be outgoing with playmates, and all of that is of course quite true. Children are also taught, however, that reading for anything but short periods was somehow unhealthy, that daydreaming or staying alone for anything but a brief period meant that the child was withdrawn, and that his activities—or hers—were somehow unnatural.

Many men and women in the same fashion, who do not fit the conventional sexual frameworks, take stands in the same way. A man may decide he wants to be a homosexual because he cannot fit into the usual pattern. There is obviously, however, no contradiction between habits of subjective thought and creativity and the physical enjoyment of the body and its abilities.

Since you are obviously able to enjoy physical activity at times, you chose to remain alone rather than “play with the others.” As you matured you each to some degree carried beliefs that physical activity and subjective activity were somehow, and to varying degrees, opposed to the other—one being accepted by society, and the other frowned upon.

You believed that you should be outgoing, vigorous, somewhat competitive, and you believed you should be socially oriented, while at the same time you believed that those things conflicted in a basic way with other drives. You felt you should be introverted, have periods of isolation, time to sit and think, to write and paint, to look inward rather than outward. In periods of intense inner activity that were enjoyable and productive, you disapproved of yourselves because you were not at the same time socially oriented, vigorously involved in exercises, or physically oriented pursuits, and so you disapproved of yourselves.

Conventionally, they enjoy having what they think of as highly creative people in the neighborhood. Your lives make them think of their own hidden aspirations. You bring up questions for them. In a strange way, they feel comforted by your presences. They know there are differences, but they are far more willing to see the creative aspects of your lives than you give them credit for.