“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. It has nothing to do with long words and sorrowful faces. It has to do with the dance of consciousness that is within you and with the sense of spiritual adventure that is within your hearts. That is the meaning of spirituality and as I have told you before, if I could, I would do a merry dance about the room to show you that your vitality is not dependent upon a physical image. It is not dependent upon your youth. It is not dependent upon your body. It rings and sings through the universe and through your entire personality. It is a sense of joy and makes all creativity possible.

So do not think you are being spiritual when you are being long-faced—and do not think you are being spiritual when you berate yourself for your sins. The seasons within your system come and go. The sun falls upon your face whether you think you are a sinner or a saint. The vitality of the universe is creativity and joy and love and that is spirituality. And that is what I shall tell the readers of my book.

So do not think you are being spiritual when you are being long-faced, and do not think you are being spiritual when you berate yourself for your sins. [...] The vitality of the universe is creativity and joy and love, and that is spirituality. [...]

True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth, and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. [...] It has to do with the dance of consciousness that is within you, and with the sense of spiritual adventure that is within your hearts.

That is the meaning of spirituality; and as I have told you before, if I could I would do a merry dance about the room to show you that your vitality is not dependent upon a physical image. [...]

[...] As a young mean, Nearing, as he told you, was aware of spiritualism, and of those very aspects that were so explored by James, and he was fascinated. Spiritualism exists with such fervor in your country because Americans like the idea of a communication with the dead on an individual basis, minus the intervention of priests, and hence the pioneering spirit was early tuned to do-it-yourself séances and the like. Americans would explore the spiritual world as they pioneered the physical continent.

As he grew older, however, he remembered more and more that scent of spiritual exploration, the encounters with spiritualism, and he began to wonder if after all it were possible that spiritual nourishment of itself would better man’s state. [...]

Emerson, Whitman, to some extent Thoreau—these were men who spoke of self-reliance, either in the natural or the spiritual world, or both. [...]

[...] He grew sore with the worker’s plight, and felt that thoughts of art, spiritual merit, or pretensions were meaningless if men were ill-fed. [...]

This sense of division within the self forces you to think that there is a remote, spiritual, wise, intuitive inner self, and a bewildered, put-upon, spiritually ignorant, inferior physical self, which happens to be the one you identify with. Many of you believe, moreover, that the physical self’s very nature is evil, that its impulses, left alone, will run in direct opposition to the good of the physical world and society, and fly in the face of the deeper spiritual truths of inner reality. [...] In the face of such beliefs the ideal of psychic development, or astral travel, or spiritual knowledge, or even of sane living, seems so remote as to be impossible. [...]

[...] There are many schools for spiritual advancement that teach you to “get rid of the clutter of your impulses and desires,” to shove aside the self that you are in search of a greater idealized version. [...] They provide in-built spiritual and biological impetuses toward your most ideal development (underlined). [...]

Many people write requesting that I outline the proper methods for achieving astral projection, for example, or psychic advancement, or spiritual understanding. [...]

Many of you keep searching for some seemingly remote spiritual inner self that you can trust and look to for help and support, but all the while you distrust the familiar self with which you have such intimate contact. [...]

[...] The freedom and spontaneity of spirituality cannot be maintained or even tasted by denying the reality of the physical being. [...] They will lead naturally, spontaneously, to a spirituality that is a natural outgrowth of present experience. In this manner the natural world that you know will become a threshold of what you call spiritual activity and not a barrier to it. [...]

It does no good to say that one choice was better than the other, and do not worry yourself with such concerns for you are interwoven spiritually with every atom and molecule that exists within those of your children and your wife. And the spiritual isolation that you feel is a reminder of the inner self that only enters into concourse with the flesh but is of itself independent and knows its origin and remembers even through the eons the miraculous exaltation and agony of recognition that the flesh knows. [...]

[...] But you know, as I have told you often, that spirituality is not a thin-blooded intellectual concept divorced from the emotions that you know. That spirituality is as dignified as brother Theodore’s idiot flower is dignified, or as dignified as a wasp, or as our beloved monster here (Willie the cat). [...]

[...] And there is also the unspeakable exaltation that you feel and cannot explain, as you watch your children grow and as you feel, even within yourself, the recognition, the spiritual recognition, that comes when flesh meets flesh and this is what you chose to encounter. [...]

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SPIRITUAL DRAMAS.

[...] An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.

[...] As I stated before, that part of the world was filled with would-be messiahs, self-proclaimed prophets, and so forth, and in those terms it was only a matter of time before man’s great spiritual and psychic desires illuminated and filled up that psychological landscape, filling the prepared psychological patterns with a new urgency and intent. [...]

[...] And the belief was man’s response to (long pause) intuitional knowledge, to inner knowing, and to spiritual comprehension.

Your brilliance (?) in your work, and Ruburt’s in his, partially results from the fact that you ignored the mental reality, the psychic and spiritual reality you saw all about you. [...]

Be courageous enough then to ignore some of the physical reality you see, as you were courageous enough to ignore the psychic and spiritual realities, and make your own. [...]

I am including this information in this chapter on religion because it is important that you realize that spiritual ignorance is at the basis of so many of your problems, and that indeed your only limitations are spiritual ones.

[...] Obviously, then, beyond these earthly historic religious dramas, the seemingly recurring tales of gods and men, there are spiritual realities.

[...] Behind the frame of good and evil is a far deeper spiritual value. [...]

The third personality of Christ will indeed be known as a great psychic, for it is he who will teach humanity to use those inner senses that alone make true spirituality possible. [...]

[...] And if you lie to yourselves about your feelings or gloss them over, then you cannot begin to understand the spiritual reality for you will use it instead as an aspirin to cover up the symptoms of disease both mental, spiritual and psychic. [...]

(9:55.) Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. Under such conditions you can even seek out illness to prove to yourself the strength of your own spirituality — and to impress it upon others. [...]

Some of you will have a contradictory belief that poverty is virtuous, and that wealth is a vice and represents evidence of a spiritual lack. [...]

The truly happy existence, however, is a deeply satisfying one that would include spontaneous wisdom and spiritual joy. I am not saying, in other words, that suffering necessarily leads to spiritual fulfillment, nor that all illness is accepted or chosen for such a purpose, for this is not the case.

[...] The entire structure of your existence will begin to change with these realizations, and an acceleration of spiritual and psychic growth will develop.

[...] In all of these areas, however, deep spiritual or emotional contexts are never negated. [...]

In Psyche, Seth addresses himself to the matter of human sexuality for the first time in his published works, discussing it as it relates to the private and mass psyche, and connecting sexuality with its spiritual and biological sources.

[...] He stresses the bisexual nature of humanity and the importance of bisexuality, both spiritually and biologically.

[...] Seth gives this pooling of knowledge both a spiritual and biological reality.

[...] It commented in depth upon our world since James’s death, and covered American history as it was related to spiritualism, psychology, and democracy.

[...] Spiritually the death sentence given you is another chance at life, if you are freely able to accept life with all of its conditions and to feel its full dimensions, for that alone will rejuvenate your spiritual and physical self.

[...] The experience was to inform you emotionally and spiritually of the great meaning of each individual, portray the lovely brilliance that is within each human being, and let you know that the integrity of the self and the soul exists beyond the possibility of annihilation, as you yourself will continue to exist regardless of which path you choose to take — dying within two years, or living physically on for many more. [...]

[...] The natural body and the natural world are spiritual. [...] The social world of ideas and beliefs represent ways of looking at nature and spirituality.

(In Session 725 Seth discussed the spiritual aspects of our biological nature, and in Note 4 for that session I presented brief excerpts from the material he’d given in ESP class the night before, on the truly limitless “ceilings to the self” or identity.

You think that the soul is a white wall with nothing written upon it, and so your idea of sacrilege is to shit upon it, not realizing that the shit and the soul are one, and that the biological is spiritual; and that, again — if you will forgive my homey concept — flowers grow from the shit of the earth. [...]

[...] If the first system of beliefs sees money and goods as a sign of God’s blessing, the second group views material possessions as evidence of spiritual decay.

[...] Black skin or brown skin becomes the criteria of spiritual perfection, and poverty a badge of honor to be worn not only proudly, but often to be used as an aggressive tool. [...]

Many believe that it is a time of spiritual and/or physical deterioration, an era in which all those hard-won attributes of maturity vanish, and the reasoning faculties disappear like grains of sand held too long by the thinking hands of the mind.

Even the chemical and hormonal changes that occur are those that are conducive to spiritual and psychic growth at that time. [...]

[...] The primary spiritual existence alone gives meaning to the physical one. [...] Spirituality cannot be some isolated, specialized activity or characteristic.

The exterior religious dramas are of course imperfect representations of the ever-unfolding interior spiritual realities. [...]

Exterior religious dramas are important and valuable only to the extent that they faithfully reflect the nature of inner, private spiritual existence. [...]

[...] The need, the psychological and spiritual need of the species, demanded both interior and exterior alterations of great import. [...]

[...] Your cellular knowledge of past and future probabilities alone would teach you a spiritual and corporal courtesy.

The great latent-but-always-sensed dimensions of spiritualized creaturehood will then begin to flower. [...]

[...] Always, however, there was the undeniable inner self in the background: man’s dreams, his biological and spiritual integrity, and these in one way or another were always before him.

[...] Developed, they can immeasurably enrich the race, and bring it to levels of spiritual and psychic and physical fulfillment. [...]

[...] Make no divisions between the physical and the spiritual in your lifetimes, for the spiritual speaks with a physical voice and the corporeal body is the creation of the spirit.

(10:49.) Now: In ordinary terms, this book has included no esoteric instructions to help you achieve what you may think of as spiritual development or psychic expertise. [...]

As I mentioned earlier, you will not become more spiritual by denying your flesh. [...]