“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Trapeze performers may have several acts a day, for example. It seems that such individuals perform with great daring, even with a rashness that is unfamiliar to most people. Most such performers, however, are extremely regulated. They work with a carefully calculated eye, under conditions in which each detail, however minute, is of supreme importance. No matter how often certain trapeze acts may be repeated, for example, there is always the threat of instant disaster — of missed footing, a final plunge. Through testing “fate,” death-defiers try each time they perform to prove to themselves that they are indeed safe, that they can overcome life’s most dire conditions. Period.

Individuals who defy death time and time again are actually more frightened of it than most other people are. Trapeze performers, stunt men and women, race-car riders, and many other groups have a life-style that includes death-defying stunts on a very regular basis.

For that matter, an athlete may have a great zest for motion and an impatience with reading, caring not what within the body makes it move as long as its performance is superb — while an invalid with great book knowledge about all of the body’s parts is quite unable to physically perform in a normal manner.

[...] Diagramming sentences tells you little about the spoken language, and nothing about those miraculous physical and mental performances that allow you to speak — and so diagramming the species of the world is, in the same way, quite divorced from any true understanding.

[...] Such data therefore do not help your walking performance any.

[...] Being so ignorant, how does it perform so well?

[...] When the table is performing well it seems that a direct downward pressure, applied to the edge of the tabletop, is required to overcome the force. [...] But more study is required here, and with this knowledge in mind, we will try to more accurately assess the table’s performance at future sessions.

[...] Rather late after meeting we began tipping the table, which started performing almost as soon as we sat around it. [...]

[...] This Wednesday evening the table performed as follows: Irish jigs upon request, vaulting up into the air while in Carl’s grip, chasing around our backs as Carl held it while we tried to keep up with it, skittering across the rug, knocking back and forth, and building up a very strong pressure indeed, when we tried to force the leg up in the air back down to the floor, or rug.

[...] At just about all times one or more of us was talking to the table, exhorting it to go on, to better its performance, in most positive tones.

(9:46.) Some of the material (in this session) on pain should help clear Ruburt’s mind, but the past week’s blue periods and so forth simply represented one more example of a situation in which he tried to make himself get better by “realizing the gravity of his condition”—by contrasting his performance against “normal” performance, and by the old beliefs of not trusting the body. [...]

[...] Then re-imagine the circumstances, seeing himself performing adequately, but without telling himself that he must be therefore perfectly all right on the next occasion. [...]

[...] If he wants new curtains or clothes, then the stimuli automatically activates the body to perform. [...]

[...] Do not worry if the first time our Ruburt does not perform; nor should he, but cultivate the environment in which this is normal, and he will react to the stimuli.

He is physically capable of performing now with much better flexibility than he does, and with comparative physical ease and comfort, at this time. [...]

Beyond that platform (which is not your own native one) is another that operates as “high art,” in which activity is for its own sake, for the joy and discovery of the performance or execution, a high play that sets the needs of the world at least momentarily aside, rises up above specifics into those vaster realms from which specifics emerge. [...]

[...] You need the free joy of performance. [...]

[...] Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted. [...] I merely want to show the effect of beliefs upon physical performance. [...] Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species. [...]

Your searches toward understanding excellent performance in any area — your idealisms — are all spiritually and biologically ingrained. [...]

(Pause.) You will not feel the need, say, to “justify your existence” by exaggerating a particular gift, setting up the performance of one particular feat or art as a rigid ideal, when in fact you may be pleasantly gifted but not greatly enough endowed with a certain ability to give you the outstanding praise you think you might deserve.

[...] Many people want to change the world for the better, but that ideal seems so awe-inspiring that they think they can make no headway unless they perform some great acts of daring or heroism, or envision themselves in some political or religious place of power, or promote an uprising or rebellion. [...]

(Just before supper I told Jane about my dream of last night, involving Bill Gallagher: He’d been a white-haired stage performer, and I looked down on him from a box seat in the loge of an intimate, dramatically-lit theater. Bill had lost a shoe during his act, and had stopped performing out of frustration, his rhythm interrupted. [...] I believe that before this scene, he’d had another similar episode, where an accident had halted his performance and he’d ended up frustrated and confused, but I don’t remember it clearly enough to describe.)

[...] Your idea of responsibility may give you a very poor rating, however, in your own eyes for your practical performance in life. [...] Ruburt felt for years that he should (underlined) become a more public person, do workshops, television shows, radio tours or whatever—that he should (underlined) nearly perform miracles in the psychic arena, that he should have a large class, that he should hold as many sessions for others as possible. [...]

[...] The good parent, for example, is motivated by a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment, in which case his or her “responsibilities” are almost automatically reinforced and performed. [...]

[...] Small doses of such attitudes can be handled, of course: people do not have to be entirely satisfied with their own performances in order to be reasonably happy and healthy. [...]

(Long pause.) As creative people, and as certain kinds of creative people —not being audience performers as musicians, for example—you deal with the creative construction of artistic worlds in which as your friend (painter) William Alexander would say, you are the master magician perhaps—but it is your world primarily, created according to your vision. [...]

[...] In a world in which women are considered passive and the trance largely feminine, you feel that the performance of a session could be too easily misread. [...]

At the same time you’ve felt a strong responsibility to perform publicly, to sell books, get your message across, let people see that—yes, the sessions do happen—there is no fraud involved. [...]

[...] They become stronger as the performance of them becomes more assured. Ruburt may therefore feel like performing acts, and he should try them before their competent execution can be carried through.

[...] He punished himself for not writing by making the performance very difficult. [...]

Since you value sexual performance in the most limited of terms, and use that largely as a focus of identity, then both your old and young suffer consequences that are not so much the result of age as of sexual prejudice. [...] If the man or the woman is taught that identity is a matter of sexual performance, however, and that that performance must cease at a certain age, then the sense of identity can also begin to disintegrate. If children feel that identity is dependent upon such performance, then they will begin to perform as quickly as possible. [...]

I suggest that such a statement be drawn up, for it would certainly help clarify many situations, and show Ruburt that he was performing very well indeed. The nebulous nature of the “psychic” has served to help build up a picture of an unrealistic superself (long pause), mentioned earlier, that is supposed to perform a dazzling array of activities, solving everyone’s problems, displaying all of the psychic abilities at once, from healing to finding a lost kitten. [...]

[...] I said it was essential that we communicate to that personification [named by Seth for convenience’s sake only] that its performance was quite destructive to Jane, and that it must release its hold. [...]

[...] Within those specifications certain actions are performed. [...]

(9:00.) When he demands too much of himself, there is nowhere along the line where he can securely rest, pat himself on the back, and say “You have done a good job,” because what he has performed seems so inadequate in the light of what he feels is expected. [...]

[...] At the same time, for many reasons, he had the idea that he was expected to be not merely a well-adapted natural person, but a kind of superself, solving other people’s problems, being a public personality, a psychic performer, and so forth. [...]

(Long pause at 9:48, one of many.) It almost dissolves in the imagined light of super-expected performance. [...]

(Long pause at 9:58.) He had been shy with people, shy about reading his own poetry, though determined to do so, yet he felt that he should become this public personality, or to perform. [...]

[...] They may not be pleasant, but they are expressions, often enough of valid-enough questions and fears that were overlooked or pooh-poohed as insignificant or foolish in the light of this superself image, who was expected to have no doubts, no fears, only flawless performance. [...]

Now: this analogy holds only so far, yet the firewalker’s performance can in a way be compared with Ruburt’s writing and psychic performance.

The firewalker’s performance involves one overall clear-cut performance, in which faith has already been achieved, as in Ruburt’s writing, say. [...]

[...] The performance is evidence of the fact that beliefs have a far greater effect upon the body and its capacities than is anywhere seriously considered. [...]

[...] It is highly important that Ruburt realize that his body can perform naturally. It will not automatically perform with utter ease. [...]

There would have been no question of men performing so-called feminine tasks, or of women performing so-called masculine tasks, for there no leeway for that kind of individual action would have existed.

If your individuality was programmed by your biological sex, then it would be literally impossible for you to perform any action that was not sexually programmed. [...] Since you are otherwise free to perform other kinds of activity that you think of as sexually oriented, in those areas the orientation is cultural.

[...] When women were near birth, they performed those chores that could be done in the cave dwellings, or nearby, and also watched other young children; while the women who were not pregnant were off with the males, hunting or gathering food.

[...] You were not pleased with his performance, he was not living up to your expectations. He equated then a normal physical performance, from the standpoint of his condition, as an impossible perfect performance, while feeling that nothing short of perfection would please you.

[...] His physical reassurance is necessary—that is, he needs to be reassured that physically he can improve, and perform.

[...] Actually, I agree with that statement, while also being quite aware of my own humanness and the numerous pitfalls, real and imagined, that could stand between my performance and feeling as an individual and that greater state where there isn’t anything to fear. [...] I realize its performance will call for my summoning a kind of nerve and disregard and daring that ordinarily I’d just as soon ignore in daily life....)

[...] The mother’s affections were not the child’s by right, but dependent upon how well the child cared or performed.

As mentioned earlier in other sessions he felt, erroneously, for some time that your love for him depended upon his performance as a writer and in sessions, since it could not be his by right. [...]

[...] Instead he feared that they drove you farther apart, in that he feared you would use them to spend time away from him rather than with him, and in that he did not feel able to express his own ambiguous feelings—the ideas of performance entering in here.

[...] Instead he felt that you latched upon the sessions so that they came before he did personally—that you demanded performance there in sessions, while not in bed. [...]