“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] It is that the conscious mind does not understand the unconscious mind and that your conscious mind does not understand that it is frightened of demons and believes in their existence. His mind does not believe in demons, your unconscious mind does. [...]

[...] They are a part of the heritage of your consciousness. [...]

[...] They are in the back of your mind and what you said earlier this evening was a rationalization, for you have hidden your own fears from yourself. [...]

(Pause.) If such an individual can convince himself or herself that somehow the entire affair is more in the nature of a game, then you can have at times some success, because in a game the conscious mind is willing to make allowances, and to “pretend.” In a good variety of cases, however, the formal experiment itself sets up a barrier, for the conscious mind is being asked to cooperate in a venture that it considers nearly an impossibility. [...]

The same applies to the conscious mind itself, which is not programmed in the same fashion to be the arbiter of microscopic events. [...] That blockage may still allow a kind of displacement targeting, however, in which case inner abilities are allowed to operate, but in a rather sabotaged way—not hitting the target with which the conscious mind is so familiar or concentrated upon, but hitting another microscopic target instead, in which effects are then noticeable. [...]

[...] To divert the conscious mind can therefore be of great import —enjoying television, relaxing in whatever fashion, allows the desired activity to occur. [...] Ruburt should therefore try to divert his mind more. [...]

Now: the conscious mind legitimizes physical reality. [...]

When women give birth in a crowded world they also know, and with a portion of their conscious minds, that a violation is involved. When your species sees that it is destroying other species and disrupting the natural balance, then it is consciously aware of its violation. [...] Again at the risk of repeating myself: Many of your problems result from the fact that you do not accept the responsibility of your own consciousness. [...]

(Most intently:) When this happens, the species by default must fall back upon vestiges of old instincts — that were not geared to operate in conjunction with a conscious reasoning mind, and do not comprehend your experience; that finds your “moment of reflection” an impertinent denial of impulse. So man loses full use of the animals’ regulated, graceful instinct, and yet denies the conscious and emotional discrimination given him instead.

[...] Natural guilt is a creative mechanism, meant to serve as a conscious spur in the solving of problems that, in your terms, no other animals ever had. By taking advantage of it you leap still further through unknown frontiers, and break through into dimensions of awareness that were always latent since the birth of the conscious mind.

(Long pause at 9:56.) So controls were needed lest the conscious mind, denied full use of the animals’ innate taboos, run away with itself. [...]

(10:45.) A certain kind of affirmation of self allows the brain to tune into these more spacious methods of perception that are the natural characteristics of the mind. [...] The brain (and the entire physical system) is meant to insure your bodily survival and to follow your conscious beliefs about reality. [...] You will not use your spacious mind until you affirm its reality within yourself, and until you are ready to handle the additional data which will then become consciously available to one extent or another. But the spacious mind operates through your creaturehood; in your terms it represents latent abilities of consciousness that can be more or less normal functions.

Now: Ruburt’s mind is far more aware of other realities than his brain is, but he consciously believes in the greater reality of himself and his perceptions. The brain also possesses this belief, and so it opens itself as much as possible to the mind’s activities. [...]

[...] The mind can do this far better than any computer. [...] The brain would become aware of more of the mind’s knowledge, and the probabilities of future events would be made consciously available.

[...] As Ruburt once suggested, your [modern] system of communications has already expanded the data available to a private conscious mind in a given amount of time, and this on a purely physical level.

Some of this has to do with distorted ideas of both the conscious and unconscious minds, using your terms now. Generally speaking, in Western society the conscious mind is seen as coming into its own in early adulthood, as the self rises from the bed of childhood unconsciousness into its critical awareness and differentiation. The appreciation of distinctions and differences is considered one of the greatest characteristics of consciousness, and so those aspects of it are valued. On the other hand the equally significant assimilating, combining, correlating characteristics of consciousness are overlooked. [...]

[...] Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one. The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know. In these instances the beauty and illumination of your dream state can be clear in the conscious mind, and used to enrich your physical life. [...]

In such circumstances, there are not the great artificial divisions created between the two states of consciousness. The conscious mind is better able to remember and assimilate its dreaming experience, and in dreams the self can use its waking experience more efficiently.

During Western years of adulthood, consciousness is focused most intently in one specific area of activity and physical manipulation. From childhood, the mind is trained to use its argumentative, separating qualities above all others. [...]

In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality. But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life. [...] It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions, that difficulties arise. Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain directions and blocks its awareness in others.

[...] The ego can feel cut off, lonely and frightened, however, if the conscious mind lets the ego run away with it. The ego and the conscious mind are not the same thing. [...]

(Very slowly at 11:18:) The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but in this case is turned outward toward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward. [...]

Trees and rocks possess their own consciousness, and also share a gestalt consciousness, even as the living portions of your body. [...] So the race of man also has individual consciousness and a gestalt or mass consciousness, of which you individually are hardly aware.

[...] Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding. Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind. As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.

The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much. Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms. [...] You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree. [...]

[...] This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions — or could board that plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

Your own kind of conscious mind is splendid and unique. [...] The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes you completely. [...]

The concept of nirvana (see the 637th session in Chapter Nine) and the idea of heaven are two versions of the same picture, the former being one in which individuality is lost in the bliss of undifferentiated consciousness, and the latter one in which still-conscious individuals perform mindless adoration. Neither theory contains an understanding of the functions of the conscious mind, or the evolution of consciousness — or, for that matter, certain aspects of greater physics. [...] The expanding universe theory¹ applies to the mind as well as to the universe.

The early acquiescence to beliefs has a biological importance, therefore, but as the conscious mind attains its maturity it is also natural for it to question those beliefs, and to assess them in relation to its own environment. [...]

[...] Many such Eastern schools also stress — as do numerous spiritualistic schools — the importance of the “unconscious levels of the self,” and teach you to mistrust the conscious mind.

An association could trigger the clear memory of a past agony in the bewildered new mind. [...] Man’s mind then struggled to contain many images — past, present, and future imagined ones — and was forced to correlate these in any given moment of time. [...]

The great creativity of consciousness is your heritage. [...] Each living being possesses it, and the living world consists of a spontaneous cooperation that exists between the smallest and the highest, the greatest and the lowly, between the atoms and the molecules and the conscious, reasoning mind.

[...] He does not realize that on this level, now, and regardless of my independence and other issues involved, that he creates the personalities free of time, organizes them under the leadership of the conscious mind, and assigns them tasks of great validity and importance, which are then carried out.

Ruburt himself, unconsciously but also to some extent consciously, has been more intrigued with questions concerning consciousness and personality — the role of the ego consciousness, for example — since beginning his novel, Oversoul 7 (in late March, 1972).

The living picture of the world grows within the mind. [...] Each color, each line that appears within it has first been painted within a mind, and only then does it materialize without.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. [...]

[...] They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. [...] Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.

You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now—but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

(Pause.) On the other hand, such beliefs can be accepted when it appears that the conscious mind is asleep, or dulled as in periods of shock, or during operations. [...] One of the troubles is that too specific distinctions are made between the conscious and unconscious minds. [...] This is only true, however, if you realize the power of your conscious mind in that moment, and understand the ability of your consciousness to mobilize unconscious reactions.

First of all, the unconscious is not a sponge, indiscriminately accepting material regardless of the considerations of your conscious self. All beliefs or suggestions are first sifted through your conscious mind, and only those that you accept are then permitted their penetration into the other areas of the self.

[...] None can be inflicted upon you that you do not consciously accept. [...] But instead this is taken as an indication that the conscious mind is helpless under such conditions, generally speaking, and this is not the case.

[...] She started it in a “normal” state of consciousness and ended up in an altered one — “immersed in a high state of inner concentration,” she said. [...]

[...] Your conscious mind as you understand it is the “psychological structure” that deals with conditions on a physical basis. [...]

When information “falls” into your conscious mind from those vaster areas, then it also is changed as it travels through various levels of psychological atmosphere, until it finally lands or explodes in a series of images or thoughts. [...]

[...] By its nature, however, that precise specialization and tuning of consciousness in to space and time largely precludes other less-specialized encounters with realities. [...] Nor can you remember dream events — or so it seems — as you do your normal conscious experience. In actual fact you remember consciously only certain highlighted events of your lives, and ordinary details of your days vanish as dreams seem to.

[...] You can become consciously aware of your dreams to some extent — that is, consciously aware of your own dreaming. [...]

This data must be interpreted in such a way that the conscious mind then can give a prediction, say, but also in such a way that its reality exits simultaneously with consciousness, but never so replacing consciousness that the ego grows alarmed. This is often done by the use of symbols which are not immediately apparent to consciousness, and thus are allowed through. [...] But the symbols chosen must be of a nature so that they will become meaningful to consciousness, to as large an extent as possible after emergence.

For such material to be made meaningful to the conscious personality, a training of abilities along the lines of interpretation is definitely required in most cases. Such material is a part of what we termed the initial experience, which is of electrical nature, received through the mind, broken down there as explained, and then received by the brain where it is changed or interpreted to psychological symbol form.

[...] That is, any given symbol will be the same, but it will be so chosen by the mind that it will have definite meanings to various portions of the self, and the meanings may be quite different. [...] And all of these references are contained within a given impulse, electrical impulse, that will be decoded by the mind.

[...] In the original dream experience then, the electrical reality of the dream is broken down, so to speak, into its varying intensities, by the mind.

When large doses of chemicals are used, the conscious mind is confronted full blast with very potent experiences that it was not meant to handle, and by which it is purposely made to feel powerless. (Pause.) Faced with the exterior nightmares of wars and natural disasters, the conscious mind is still directed outward into that world with which it knows it was formed to cope. [...]

[...] In the drug experience mentioned before (in the last session), startling, enforced symbols and occurrences are suddenly thrust upon the conscious mind; and more, within a context in which time as it knows it has little meaning. It [the conscious mind] cannot reflect upon phenomena subjectively. [...]

[...] Out of a knowledge of the contents of your own conscious mind you can definitely heal most maladies of the body, within conditions to be given later.

[...] The individual’s conscious mind is then forced to face the charged situation — but after the event, in retrospect. [...]

(To Ned.) You are not clear in your mind, in your subconscious mind, or even your conscious mind at times, as to what you want. [...]

Now, I will tell you a secret, but I will tell our regular students the great horror, the fear, that existed in the mind of our friend, Joseph, during the tour. He was afraid I would raise my voice and he did not know whether or not the microphones would shatter and so I spoke quietly and decorously but it is difficult to show the vitality of consciousness when I have so few methods available without using the vocal cords in joyful abandon. [...]

[...] In other words, you stretched the extensions of its own awareness and consciousness. [...] The consciousness of the cat grew and developed. [...]

[...] At the same time you extended the consciousness of the animal, it became more than it was. Its consciousness was ready to leave and adapt another form. [...]

[...] Your conscious mind was taken up fully with your activities, giving the inner self full rein. [...]

[...] You were thinking both consciously and below consciousness about Ruburt’s appointment at the dentist. [...]

[...] In physical reality a man in a desperate frame of mind is more apt to emphasize horrible aspects in the news, for example, and to see desperation rather than joy in the faces of those he meets. [...] So your frame of mind when projecting will largely determine the sort of experiences you have, and the environments you visit.

In your mind’s eye however imagine a run-down, shabby, deteriorating shamble of a house with rotting floorboards and sagging porches. [...] Then imagine a new house being built there, of your preferred choice, with all new materials, of splendid design, and see this always in your mind where before you saw the previous image.

The conscious mind is meant to align all of your capabilities in accordance with its beliefs about the nature of reality. Those resources are considerable, for they include the deepest aspects of your creativity, and powers far beneath consciousness of which you are only dimly aware.

THE CONSCIOUS MIND AS THE CARRIER OF BELIEFS.

[...]

Now: The next chapter, Eleven, to be titled: “The Conscious Mind as the Carrier of Beliefs. [...]

[...] It will seem to you that you feel aggressive or upset without reason, or that your feelings sweep down upon you without cause if you do not learn to listen to the beliefs within your own conscious mind, for they generate their own emotions.

[...] There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind. You have simply put a lid on it, allowing it to be only so conscious, and no more. You have said: “Here it is safe to be conscious, and here it is not.”

[...] You are not consciously aware of such data, however. [...] Often, however, your own stream of consciousness leads you to think of events outside of their usual order. [...] In a matter of moments it may trigger you to think of events in your childhood, so that many mental images fly through your mind. [...]

(9:54.) Now: Consciously construct a dream. Tell yourself you are going to do so, and begin with the first thought or image that comes to mind. [...]

The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. These exercises will bring you in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Your consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercises are done. [...] The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. [...]

[...] On the side of consciousness, it is a tale symbolically representing the birth of the conscious mind in the species as a whole, and the emergence of self-responsibility. [...] It represents the emergence of the conscious mind and of the strongly oriented individual self from that ground of being from which all consciousness comes.

[...] As a child it was quite necessary that you accept beliefs from others before your conscious mind could form its own.

With the birth of this consciousness came conscious responsibility for the fruits of the planet. [...]

It portrays the new consciousness seeing itself unique and separate, evolving from the tree of life and therefore able to examine its fruits, to see itself for the first time as different from others, like the serpent who crawled upon the surface of the earth. [...]

Your body repairs itself constantly, and your mind thinks — all without your normally conscious attention. [...] Your thoughts are conscious, but the process of thinking itself is not. [...]

[...] Your thinking, breathing, and motion are all guided by activities that are largely unconscious — at least from the standpoint of what you usually think of as the conscious mind.

[...] The conscious mind must be in control of all actions as much as possible, for such a person feels that only rigid, logical thought is strong enough to hold back such strong impulsive force.

It is indeed as if some inner spontaneous part of the personality is far more knowledgeable than the conscious portion of which we are so rightfully proud.