“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As soon as she saw that I couldn’t take notes. Jane began describing to me what she’d started to pick up from Seth about my condition. I was both very interested and so far out in my own world of sensation that I could hardly comment. I was taking a “body vacation,” she told me. She said much more, which she wrote about briefly Tuesday afternoon at my request. Her notes are inserted at the end of my notes. Seth, Jane said, would explain the whole thing in the next session, whenever that would be held.

First of all, a note of history: the material Ruburt got on you on his own was excellent, though unfinished. You looked at the world and saw that it was wanting. You yearned to give it some standards of excellence – standards, however, that could be applied to the entire area of living, to personal relationships, to politics, to social events, to philosophical thought.

You wanted to illuminate the world in some respect. You saw your family as a small sample of the world’s peoples, and their interrelationships with each other, and with the neighborhood, as representative of most people’s relationship with the world. You were sorry for your parents. You yearned to help both of them, as you yearned to help your brothers. That part of you existed quite intimately in your thoughts, while at the same time you found it difficult to communicate with the family [members] generally, and you were struck by the great gap of communication that seemingly existed between the most related people.

You became discontented, however, drawn yourself toward fine arts. Yet even these involved a highly specific nature. The world of art galleries is highly esoteric in its own fashion. Beside this, however, you were still searching for some direction that would allow you the greatest opportunity to provide at least a glimpse of the kind of excellence that you always carried as an ideal in your mind. That impetus was always with you in this life.

At a certain point your body does not care. It relaxes you anyway. Now Ruburt has much slighter versions, in which, say, daily or weekly tensions no longer collect as they did, which allows him some physical improvement—but he also feels that if he really relaxed he would only do the dishes or whatever. The world would hardly fall in if neither of you did anything for several days. The relaxed body, however, the truly relaxed body, can physically perform of course far better than the tense one.

Thoughts of the will and your approaching 50th and 60th birthdays have led you, Joseph, to look over you life, to ask, “What have I done? Am I a success or a failure?” But when you do so, you often ask the question through the cast of old conventional beliefs. If you ask “Is the world a better place to live because I live?” or “Have I helped the people in the world in any way?” or “Have I lifted men’s hearts or minds in any way?” or “Have I affected others for the better?” then those answers must be yes, and there is no better measure of true success.