“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: you are, of course, taught that any meaningful endeavor takes a great amount of effort of a certain kind—the exertion of the will, the utilization of the time in an organized fashion—and this can promote a tooth-gritting determination in some people.

In a sense, to “give up all effort” is almost blasphemous in the light of predominating beliefs to the contrary. Eastern religions are the only ones that even remotely try to approach such a principle, and they do so in highly distorted fashions. Western religion and science promote the ideas of competition, effort, the emphasis upon the will, divorced from the imagination, so that to “give up all effort” can be read as an abdication of responsibility, an indication of laziness and sloth; or in fundamental Christian terms, the devil finds work for idle hands.

In a strange fashion desire promotes action seemingly without effort, or the effort seems so natural, so spontaneous and so joyful that it is not recognized as effort in the old fashion. The great artists did not use their abilities so much through the utilization of will and effort as they did through following their own natural impulses, desires, and intents. These form a true sense of purpose, so that the aspects of the will and the effort fall naturally into place to bring about the desires.

The letting-go of effort should be also a mental and psychological stance applied not only to Ruburt’s physical dilemma, but to his—and your—relationships with the subjective and objective worlds. Again, such letting go will indeed always promote action, and get you off dead center, so to speak. This is not a statement of passivity in conventional terms, but a creative releasing of the basic personality from the restraints of hampering beliefs.

The letting go of effort will indeed more and more release such desires. Ruburt has to a considerable extent largely disposed of the habit of negative projections, though he still catches some now and then. Except for the point of power, he has not actively promoted his desire to walk normally, and this was relatively wise, for as he begins to let go of effort he was not tempted to think of contradictions, as he might have had he more actively encouraged those desires.