“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many people in a quandary of indecision write to Ruburt. Such a correspondent might lament, for example: “I do not know what to do, or what direction to follow. I think that I could make music my career. I am musically gifted. On the other hand (pause), I feel a leaning toward psychology. I have not attended to my music lately, since I am so confused. Sometimes I think I could be a teacher. In the meantime, I am meditating and hoping that the answer will come.” (Pause.) Such a person is afraid to trust any one impulse enough to act upon it. All remain equally probable activities. Meditation must be followed by action — and true meditation is action (underlined). Such people are afraid of making decisions, because they are afraid of their own impulses — and some of them can use meditation to dull their impulses, and actually prevent constructive action.

Dictation: Now let us return again to our discussion of impulses, in connection with probable actions.

(9:35.) Impulses arise in a natural, spontaneous, constructive response to the abilities, potentials, and needs of the personality. They are meant as directing forces. Luckily, the child usually walks before it is old enough to be taught that impulses are wrong, and luckily the child’s natural impulses toward exploration, growth, fulfillment, action and power are strong enough to give it the necessary springboard before your belief systems begin to erode its confidence. You have physical adult bodies. The pattern for each adult body existed in the fetus — which again, “luckily,” impulsively, followed its own direction.

[...] Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations. In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.

Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. [...] It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. [...]

[...] Yet your more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose. The individual must feel that his actions count. He is driven to violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is that last resort.

[...] You are trying too hard in that direction, as with meditation. [...] In its own way hypnosis involves a psychic kind of play—meditation involves a psychic kind of play and lovemaking involves a psychic kind of play. [...]

[...] The same thing in meditation—let your inner self play in your meditation and let your body play in your lovemaking.

[...] This involves action on your part and the focusing of attention—then this will help clear away some of your difficulty.

[...] Your impulses are part of the great multi-action of being. (Pause.) At deeper levels, the impulsive portion of the personality is aware of all actions upon the earth’s surface. You are involved in a cooperative venture, in which your slightest impulse has a greater meaning, and is intimately connected with all other actions. [...]

It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise. [...]

[...] You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones — but you must move (underlined) in the direction of your ideals through action. [...]

[...] Soon automatically the system becomes adjusted to normal action, and the process becomes automatic again. It is also important to react when you feel an annoyance, rather than postpone action, whenever this is possible. [...]

[...] I would like you when you have time to meditate on the various kinds of abundance that you do presently enjoy. [...]

[...] It is only when you overload the nervous system by such repressed action that it then begins a cycle of overreaction to what seems to be one event.

[...] Nebene prayed and meditated often, so his framework, you see, is often the same as yours, and those meditative periods provide the necessary conditions on both of your parts.

[...] Because for one thing it was general enough so that it did not bring any immediate details into your minds, and left plenty of room for action in an overall manner. [...]

Those suggestions give room for action. [...]

(Pause.) Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams. [...] The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man or molecule. [...]

[...] Your impulses are immersed in the quality called faith, for they urge you into action in the faith [that] the moment for action exists. [...]

[...] Even if they appear contradictory at any given time, overall they will be seen to form constructive patterns toward action that point more clearly towards your own clear path for fulfillment and development.

[...] I do not want to shock you, but dictation — continuation of our last chapter (2: “Mass Meditations,” etc.).

Not only does television actually serve as a mass means of communal meditation, but it also presents you with highly detailed, manufactured dreams, in which each viewer shares to some extent. [...]

3. Although this is the first session for Mass Events in which Seth had discussed Framework 1 and Framework 2, at the moment Jane and I are a good deal more familiar with his ideas concerning those fields of action than the reader is; see the opening notes for the last (814th) session. [...]

[...] You have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies. [...]

[...] The villains consisted of the following ideas: that the world is unsafe, and growing deadly; that the species itself is tainted by a deadly intent; that the individual has no power over his or her reality; that society or social conditions exist as things in themselves, and that their purposes run directly counter to the fulfillment of the individual; and lastly, that the end justifies the means, and that the action of any kind of god is powerless in the world.

[...] When you see evil everywhere in man’s intent — in your own actions and those of others — then you set yourself up against your own existence, and that of your kind. [...]

[...] In the inner world you or the dog can walk through the door without effort, because desire is action. Desire is action.

[...]

(9:48.) A prime example, of course, is the “work” done to keep each and every creature alive and breathing, the “work” done to keep the planets in their places, the “work” being done so that one evolutionist can meditate over his theories.

A-1 may be used also as a great framework for creativity, concentration, study, refreshment, rest and meditation. [...]

[...] Having made it the present is changed, and quite clearly you perceive exactly the way it is changed and what actions and events will flow from the change into the future that belongs to that particular alternate present.

The next adjacent level now would be A-1-c, which is an extension of the one just given, in which there is greater freedom of action, mobility and experience. [...]

([Ron:] “Within this system of meditation you talked about the creative vitality and the creative energy, that the idea of the end goal is the identity of the source of All That Is ...what is Buddha doing now?”)

[...] Begin if you want then, with what seems to be intellectual meditation, intellectual thought, and then let it carry you away, and it will carry you into a feeling of concept in which you understand a new concept. [...]

[...] You very nicely projected them upon a person who was bonded as you were by all kinds of taboos, specifically against any such behavior, where they would be least reciprocated in physical terms, when any such action would automatically involve all kinds of guilt and retaliation, the most difficult position of which you could conceive. [...]

[...] The idea comes from Framework 2, and Framework 2’s activity fuels the body’s actions. [...]

[...] Remember, however, to concentrate now upon, say, Prentice’s failings are an exercise in negative meditation, in negative suggestion, so try, each of you, to avoid that. [...]

[...] You do not need drugs, hypnotism, or even meditation. [...]

The dream state provides you with a trial framework in which you explore probable actions and decide upon the ones you want to physically materialize. [...]

[...] If you are used to terms like meditation, try to forget the term during this procedure. [...]

[...] It stirs you up and prepares you for action. [...]

Then you feel as if you are the pawns of fate, and the idea of probable actions seems like the sheerest nonsense. [...]

[...] It does not mean that you must meditate for hours, or study your own thought processes with such vigor that you ignore other activities. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) In that probable reality, to which each of you can belong to some extent, each person will recognize his or her inherent power of action and decision, and feel an individual sense of belonging with the physical world that springs up in response to individual desire and belief.⁷

[...] Not only are these released, but they form a propelling action that allows energy to flow in the opposite direction. As chemical reactions allow the body to utilize energy and form physical materializations, so the excess built up becomes, then, a propelling force, allowing action to flow in what you would call subjective directions.

Some frogs jeered and scoffed at him.
Others called him great.
He only smiled and went off by himself,
Poor lonely frog, to meditate.

After projection is accomplished, however, there is a marked decline in chemical activity and hormone action, a drop in body temperature and a drop in blood pressure. [...]