“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: every individual alive is intimately concerned at certain levels with all of the national and global challenges in the political and social and religious arena.

It may seem that nations behave only too impulsively, that for example the just-released American hostages were kidnapped as a result of highly impulsive behavior. In fact, that event might only seem to prove that impulsive behavior is basically aggressive, undependable, and chaotic. As a matter of fact, the students took such regrettable actions not because they gave into impulsive behavior, but because the road to true impulsive expression had been blocked so long that such actions became one of the few possible ways of giving vent to certain expressions. When you are a hostage you cannot express your own impulses, of course. Your free will is highly curtailed for all practical purposes. It is curtailed because the number of impulses are so drastically reduced by circumstance.

Whenever, and for whatever reasons you block the normally free flow of impulses, you also curtail the exercise of free will, for free will involves you in the experience of choosing between the actualization of one impulse or another. The captors then cut down on the freedom of the hostages by reducing the number of impulses to which the hostages could respond. This is all so clear that it is difficult to express step by step. The telling itself makes the affair seem complex—but whether or not you are dealing with private behavior, with the treatment of one person in regard to his or her own impulses, or whether you are dealing with a mass event of political nature, involving the enforced blockage of impulses on the part of one group toward another, you are necessarily cutting down on the exercise of free will.

Years ago, when the Gallery of Silence people began to bug him, he felt threatened, afraid that he would become the brunt of fanatics or extremists. He was nevertheless determined to take some kind of a public stand—for not to do so would mean not to express himself through his books at all. He knew he would never give into that course, but he felt that some of that dates back to childhood habits and beliefs, when his very food and bed was given him by the auspices of the public.

The information in Mass Events and in our sessions helped him use impulses to a far better degree than he had before, and helped him keep some balance, let him advance in understanding despite the period of difficulty. Still at various times and throughout the period, he used what he thought of as that additional protection: the symptoms kept him inside, where it seemed he could indeed express himself with the least duress. At the same time he was learning that expression denied at one level means expression denied to some extent at all levels (louder)—so that of course his creative work also suffered to some degree.

You have definite signs of the body’s overall positive response: the arms are straighter, the feet stronger, the ankles more flexible, and overall adjustments are constantly being made. With all this you have the changes in the thighs and hips, so that the muscular rigidity has definitely given away. The entire stance is altering and the circulation improving.

(10:20.) At the same time, he has been extremely uncomfortable. Each day the entire body is learning to relax more. The flesh becomes more pliable, and as that occurs in response to his newer beliefs in safety, still he must reassure himself that all is (underlined) well, and give permission for further release.

(“I was hardly aware of my ass or anything else,” she said. “I felt a whole lot of stuff there on the hostages—stuff it would take forever to get, darn it....” So we talked about what a great book Seth could do on the hostage question. “Before you got through it would cover history, religion, science—the whole works,” Jane said. I agreed that it would certainly encapsulate our whole civilized world structure before Seth finished it. “Forget it,” Jane said. “We’ve got one half done now.” She wanted to know what would happen to Seth’s book on dreams in the meantime, and I explained that it would only wait until the other project was finished. After all, it was waiting now for us to get back to it.