“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) When you think, colon: “Life is earnest,” and decide to put away childish things, then often you lose sight of your own creativity and become so deadly serious that you cannot play, even mentally. Spiritual development becomes a goal that must be attained. The goal is to be achieved through hard work, and as long as you believe this you do not understand what the spirit is.

I keep returning to natural analogies — but plants do not work at developing their potential. They are not beautiful because they believe it is their responsibility to please your eye. They are beautiful because they love themselves and beauty. When you are so serious, you almost always distort the nature of your own spirit as far as your understanding of it is concerned. You cannot let your guard down long enough to discover what it is. You keep looking for new rules or regulations, or methods of discipline.

The life that you consider real represents one narrow stratum of even your physical experience. I am not speaking here of other realities that could add to that dimension. (Pause.) Play brings you a needed rest from your distorted concepts of selfhood, and many of the world’s finest inventions have come when the inventor was not concentrating upon work, but indulging in pastimes or play.

The upstart, for instance, may be displaying all of the bold aspects inhibited by other family members. Through this person the others may vicariously share the excitement or suspense of those experiences that are otherwise blocked. On the other hand the achiever may be completely hiding such impulses, while expressing faithfully the desires of other family members for “excellence” and discipline. Now the same can apply to counterparts, and those in your experience can show to you, in exaggerated form, comma, abilities of your own upon which you have not chosen to concentrate. You can learn much from your counterparts, therefore, and they from you. Those counterparts that you meet will be working, playing, and being more or less within your own culture. This does not mean that you are bits and pieces of some hypothetical whole self.

You like to be an initiator or a follower or a nourisher. You like to create variations on old systems, or you like to create new ones. You like to deal primarily with healing, or with information, or with physical data. You like to deal with sight, or sound, with dreams, or with translating inner data into the working psychic material of your society. So you choose a certain focus, as you choose ahead of time your physical family.¹¹