“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“The gurus say: ‘Give it all up.’ One of those we read about today counsels: ‘When you want to do one thing, do another instead. Do not do what you want to do, but what you should do.’ Never trust the self that you are, the gurus say, but the self that you should be. And that self is supposed to be dead to desire, beyond wanting or caring; yet paradoxically, this nonfeeling leads to bliss. The gurus say that All That Is is within you, yet tell you not to trust yourself. If All That Is didn’t want appearances, we wouldn’t experience any! Yet appearances, the gurus say, are untruths, changing and therefore false.²

“What is this passion for nonbeing, this denial of sensual life, that drives so many gurus and self-proclaimed prophets? They speak out against desire while propelled by the overwhelming desire to lose themselves. They luxuriate in a kind of cosmic masturbation, titillating their psychic organisms into pitches of mindless excitement; cavorting in orgasms of self-surrender. They bask in a sort of universal steam bath that drives all impurities of individuality or creativity from their souls, leaving them immersed, supposedly forever, in a bliss beyond description; in which, indeed, their own experience disappears.

Yet Buddhist belief, for instance, maintains that our perception of the world is not fundamental, but an illusion; our “ignorance” of this basic undifferentiated “suchness” then results in the division of reality into objects and ideas. But why call our generalized awareness an illusion, instead of regarding it as one of the innumerable manifestations that reality takes? No one is free of certain minimum physical needs or of self-oriented thought, I remarked to Jane recently, and each nation strives to expand its technological base no matter what its philosophy may be. Would a widespread use of Eastern religious doctrines be more practical on our earth today, or the kind of self-knowledge Seth advocates? Even given their undeniable accomplishments, why didn’t the Eastern countries create ages ago the immortal societies that could have served as models for those of the West to emulate — cultures and/or nations in which all the mundane human vicissitudes (in those terms) had been long understood and abolished: war, crime, poverty, ignorance, and disease?

(Being individualists, then, as I wrote in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1, we don’t concentrate upon whatever parallels exist between Seth’s concepts on the one hand and those of Eastern religious, philosophical, and mystical doctrines on the other; while we know of such similarities, we’re just as aware of how different from them Seth’s viewpoint can be, too. I added that even though we have no interest in putting down other approaches to inner reality, still we’re firm believers in the “inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms.”¹ So, here, we leave it up to the reader to make the intuitive and overt connections between Seth’s philosophy and the material Jane wrote today. The interested reader will also be able to compare her composition with certain passages in her long poem, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, when that work is published in book form in September 1975.

[...] As given [at various times over the years, mostly in personal material], they involve cultural training and religious indoctrinations.⁴ He is challenging, finally, the old beliefs that say that the self’s spontaneity is not to be trusted. [...]