“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the truest regard, your life is provided for you by these spontaneous processes. As I’ve mentioned in past books, at one time the human personality was “more at one with itself.” It accommodated unconscious and conscious experience more equitably. Man was more aware of his dreams and so-called unconscious activity.

It is only because civilized man has somewhat overspecialized in the use of one kind of knowledge over another that people fear the unconscious, spontaneous portions of the self. The fear alone causes them to block out still more and more unconscious knowledge. Since the spontaneous portions are so related to bodily activity, they are very important in facilitating good health, and when people feel divorced from their spontaneous selves, they also feel divorced to the same extent from their own bodies.

(Long pause.) These attitudes may be reflected in rather simple compulsive actions: the woman who cleans the house endlessly, whether it needs it or not; the man who will follow certain precise, defined routes of activity — driving down certain streets only to work; washing his hands much more frequently than other people; the person who constantly buttons and unbuttons a sweater or vest. Many such simple actions show a stereotyped kind of behavior that results from a desperate need to gain control over oneself and the environment.

Nature and the inner nature of man are both seen to contain savage, destructive forces against which civilization and the reasoning mind must firmly stand guard.