“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you first learned to write in school, you had to be taught how to form the letters. You made many mistakes. Finally, however, you could form the letters quite easily. You felt triumphant. You forgot the mistakes you had made in the past. You had accomplished something.

Then you were told that you had to put those letters together to make words. Again you made many mistakes, and forgot them as with delight you now wrote separate words. Then you were told to put the words into sentences, and you followed the same procedure. You forgot your mistakes. Were you stupid or dumb—or an asshole—when you could only form simple letters? Obviously not. Your aspirations and your curiosity kept leading you toward a more complete development, until you could finally read and write whole paragraphs.

These were all stages of development, then, and the same applies to your life. Your so-called mistakes exist as mistakes only in the light of your aspirations to perform better, to express more fully developed experiences, rather than to write better sentences.

It is self-defeating, therefore, to blame yourself for mistakes, so-called, simply because in the light of your present development they are seen as less-developed acts than those to which you now aspire. Whenever you catch yourself disapproving of yourself for past mistakes, read these passages. Do not check on yourself all the time. Trust that you will learn what you want to learn as automatically as you once learned to read or speak, or as automatically as you think.

In your realm of reality, mistakes are a part of the learning process. They do not even seem to be mistakes until you are “at the next level” of development, or a step higher in your understanding—as when, say, in the sixth grade you looked back and saw a page of your own childish lettering done at the age of five.

I realize it is difficult to understand at times, but even your so-called mistakes have many far-reaching beneficial results that do not show in any isolated fashion. They may add to your understanding of yourself and others. They may be applied beneficially in entirely different areas of your life—so stop disapproving of yourself, of your “mistakes.” Try to set your goals and to trust that the proper impulses will come to you to bring them about and that others will be disposed in your direction, for their own reasons. In the meantime, try to live in the present as much as possible.