“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:54.) While you believed in competition, then competition became not only a reality but an ideal. Children are taught to compete against each other. The child naturally “competes” against herself or himself (amused) in an urge to outdo old performance with new. Competition, however, has been promoted as the ideal at all levels of activity. It is as if you must look at others to see how you are doing — and when you are taught not to trust your own abilities, then of course you need the opinions of others overmuch. I am not speaking of any playful competition, obviously, but of a determined, rigorous, desperate, sometimes almost deadly competition, in which a person’s value is determined according to the number of individuals he or she has shunted aside.

(Pause, then all intently:) Religion and science alike denied other species any real consciousness. When man spoke of the sacredness of life — in his more expansive moods — he referred to human life alone. You are not in competition with other species, nor are you in any natural competition with yourselves. Nor is the natural world in any way the result of competitiveness among species. If that were the case you would have no world at all.

In your country, the free enterprise system originated — change the word to “immersed” — is immersed in strange origins. It is based upon the democratic belief in each individual’s right to pursue a worthy and equitable life. But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and with the belief, then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.

[...] In strict Darwinian terms, man and animal alike had to be turned aggressively outward in the most competitive of physical ways. [...]

[...] The soul or any remnant of it vanished, so that all of the action had to occur in an arena where competition ruled. [...]

[...] The ideas of financial competition, advocated, came into direct conflict, Joseph, with your own inclinations to be an artist. [...]

The whole idea was developed in the most mechanistic of terms, stressing competition among all aspects of life, pitting one life form against another, and using physical strength and dexterity, swiftness and efficiency, as the prime conditions for the survival of any individual or species.

Children were urged in one way or another to be aggressive, competitive, and generally to fit the conventional idea of the extrovert. [...]

You believed that you should be outgoing, vigorous, somewhat competitive, and you believed you should be socially oriented, while at the same time you believed that those things conflicted in a basic way with other drives. [...]

[...] To some extent, again then, the sale of a book, a new sale, is somehow connected in your mind with disapproval of yourself, Joseph, in that Ruburt seems able to express what I think you interpret as competitiveness, that you feel you are not expressing—and you add that to your arsenal of disapproval. [...]

[...] By using the powers of your subconscious mind correctly, you free your mind of all sense of competition and anxiety in buying and selling.)

[...] They become embarrassed in late boyhood when kissed by their mothers, as a rule — yet it is quite natural to be both independent and dependent, cooperative and competitive.

[...] The feeling of competition between the two abilities operates in the other fashion, of course, so that if you have not been writing you feel the same unease. [...]

(Long pause.) You cannot separate the elements of a psyche, approving of some abilities and not others, putting some in competition with others, without experiencing difficulties. [...]

(Jane’s Seth voice today was quiet, and I had to listen in competition with noises outside and in the halls.)

Your entire world of commerce and advertisements, of competition and of business, prolong such attitudes. [...]

[...] There is no competition between them and animals, for example, and they are not basically aggressive, though they could be extremely dangerous if they were cornered, or if their young were attacked.

[...] On the other hand, some upper-middle-class families stress competition to such a degree that it seems to the children that they are only valued for their achievements, rather than being loved for simply being the people they are.

(Whereupon Peggy remarked that she was used to that kind of competition at the newspaper. She has been aware for some time that each new woman reporter seems to regard her, Peg, as competition.)

[...] Otherwise you run into the old problem of contradictions, and if you believe that distractions are simply that—distractions—in competition with your work, then they will certainly seem to be in your experience.

[...] Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings. [...]

[...] Western religion and science promote the ideas of competition, effort, the emphasis upon the will, divorced from the imagination, so that to “give up all effort” can be read as an abdication of responsibility, an indication of laziness and sloth; or in fundamental Christian terms, the devil finds work for idle hands.

[...] There is no competition between them. [...]

[...] The belief in the struggle for survival so super-pervades that anything but the most competitive, determined, super-valiant, compulsive desire to hold onto life appears to be cowardly, a cop-out, at best an unexplainable, erratic, unnatural response to life’s conditions. [...]

[...] Your gods became masculine then; competitive. [...]

[...] The crowds acclaim the sense of competition, the excitement, the rewards, and the belief in performance have all been responsible for the breaking of previous records. [...]

[...] The businessman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his ideal of surviving in a competitive world — he suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.