“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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was somehow unhealthy, that daydreaming or staying alone for anything but a brief period meant that the child was withdrawn, and that his activities—or hers—were somehow unnatural.

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.

Much of the propaganda is nearly invisible. It appears everywhere. The body and mind are one. Bates’s book, or rather philosophy, suggesting that the eyes were not made for reading, is an example of a different kind, implying that there were no books when the eye was created—and so therefore it is not natural for the eye to see letters—while it is natural for the eye to see, say, trees. The body adjusts its rhythms in a quite healthy manner to your activities, and without polarized habits of thought, periods of deep creativity will automatically be followed by periods of walking, natural exercise of one kind or another, in which subjective thought and body motion are synchronized.

Ruburt stands taller—observably. He is using muscles in new ways. Gaining strength and vitality. Your body is already in excellent shape, in general terms—we are not speaking of athletes. It would need, naturally, some period of training if you were thinking of climbing mountains, or expected to ski down a good slope tomorrow—but it is well prepared for normal activity. Only your beliefs impede it—so work with those beliefs before you shovel the drive. It is the dilemma behind the whole thing that is important, the implied conflicts between subjective and objective activity. And the responsibilities you feel this entails.

You have both moved through many periods of understanding, where others might have stopped, and the going-ahead always involves new challenges. Your friend Bill Gallagher’s operation represented a triumph on his part, for he regained his health in one important area—an achievement of worth. But it also represented a failure of a kind, a stopping-point at a certain level of development.