“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(11:37.) The emotions follow beliefs. [...]

A man or woman who knows hate also understands the difference between that emotion and love. The ambiguities, the contrasts, the similarities, the affirmation of the creature self, allows for the free flow of emotion. [...] They try to “affirm” what they think of as positive emotions. [...]

Emotions simply are. [...] You cannot affirm one emotion and deny another without setting up barriers. [...]

[...] Cells are highly influenced by your behavior and beliefs. [...]

[...] Those opportunities involved emotional understanding, a very close and emotional contact with a particular belief system, and a firsthand view of a certain kind of reality structure. [...]

[...] On the other hand, for the time being he had a very secure belief system against which for quite a full number of years he could test his own mental, emotional and spiritual vigor. [...]

(Long pause at 9:17.) The emotional situation did not lean in that direction: they had parted too many years before. It was as if Marie were saying, “This is the kind of a life those beliefs can create. [...]

[...] She lived in a relatively tumultuous emotional climate, provided with one kind of emotional excitement or another all the while. [...]

[...] Each of your beliefs, therefore, has its own unique origin and feeling patterns, so you must for yourself travel back through your beliefs and your own feelings until intellectually and emotionally you realize your rightness, your completely original existence in time and space as you know it.

Because you have free will you have the responsibility and the gift, the joy and the necessity, of working with your beliefs and of choosing your personal reality as you desire. [...] Each of you must intellectually and emotionally accept it, however.

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them. [...]

[...] Once more, because you are self-conscious beings your beliefs regulate your reality. [...] Your free will allows for the freedom of any belief, including one that says you are unworthy, with no right to your existence.

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. [...] The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. [...]

(9:40.) Those mythological images and their belief system were shared by all—peasants and the wealthy—to a large degree. They were, then, highly charged emotionally. [...]

[...] It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system. Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework. That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found elsewhere, brought art into that great flowering.

[...] While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. [...]

[...] The curtains, the old ones, represented now areas of belief and attitudes held by others which Ruburt disagreed with, but to which he acquiesced out of concern for other people’s opinions. In making the house your own you straighten out your own beliefs and release your emotions and abilities.

[...] It is indeed quite possible to do so, for you will be working with material with which you are intimately familiar: your own thoughts, emotions, and beliefs.

[...] All of the conflicting beliefs that have been mentioned thus far are the end result of what I have called before the “official line of consciousness.” Certainly people experienced disease long before those conflicting beliefs began — but again, that is because of the part that disease states play in the overall health of individuals and of the world.

(Long pause.) Large numbers of the population do indeed live unsatisfactory lives, with many individuals seeking goals that are nearly unattainable because of the conglomeration of conflicting beliefs that all vie for their attention. [...]

This alternate way of thinking is biologically pertinent, for it should be obvious now that certain beliefs and ideas serve to foster health and vitality, while others impede it.

While that largely invisible—emotionally invisible—belief is carried, then anything the self does must be scrutinized, put to the test, while in the meantime beliefs that have sustained others are suspended.

Ruburt, in those terms, started from scratch as a member of your society who had finally thrown aside, as you had, the current framework of belief. For some time he was simply between belief systems, discarding some entirely, accepting portions of others; but he was mainly a pioneer, and this while carrying largely unknowingly and invisibly the one basic belief of society that you cannot trust the self.

[...] Now you also have shared that belief strongly enough in any case so that your joint beliefs merged. His symptoms represent for him the one point of vacuum, comparatively speaking, where the acceleration that has otherwise occurred has not as yet clearly penetrated; and jointly they represent the area in which your combined beliefs have not caught up to your knowledge.

[...] The physical financial abundance, for example, automatically and easily was accepted despite beliefs in the past to the contrary—and even in spite of your own negative beliefs in that regard.

You must change the belief. [...] I react with such great emotion to small things.” But that is a belief, and a limiting one.

[...] Beliefs are strong ideas about the nature of reality. Ideas generate emotion. [...]

[...] In so doing, you see, you accept your belief about reality as a characteristic of reality itself, and so the belief is transparent or invisible to you. [...]

[...] Because ideas have an electromagnetic reality, beliefs, because of their intensity, radiate strongly. Due to the organizing structure of your own psychological nature, similar beliefs congregate, and you will readily accept those with which you already agree.

[...] With the writing I sought to make sense of everything at least intellectually, but for the moment at least, I thought, this left untouched what seemed to be the more powerful emotional tangle of beliefs. [...]

[...] If there is a large body of beliefs, however, that dampen those bodily purposes, that encourage timidity rather than courage, promote fear rather than faith, then you run into difficulty—particularly if the grounds for those beliefs are not present in any given moment. [...]

[...] On the other hand, when you have them, make a point to recognize that they are the result of cultural beliefs, beliefs that often run counter to the body’s natural knowledge of optimism (pause) and saving inner balance. [...]

Many appearances make those statements look evidential but they are only evidential in that they show the power of beliefs and suggestion. Understanding that, you see, can really give you greater leeway, for while you might still recognize such beliefs in yourself at times, you will also be able to recognize their source—and by doing so automatically confound them. [...]

Some of the most complicated ways of trying to put conflicting beliefs together are often mental or emotional ones. [...]

Some people possess beliefs that are so in opposition to each other that they are forced into some of the most complicated mental or emotional footwork. [...]

“MESSAGES” FROM GODS, DEMONS, HEROES,
AND OTHER PROMINENT PERSONS — OR,
MORE CONFLICTING BELIEFS

Conflicting beliefs about the nature of reality can bring about dilemmas in almost any form, for the individual will always try to make sense out of his or her surroundings, and try to at least see the world as a cohesive whole.

[...] Usually more than one belief is involved. Parallel with the belief that vision will fail, you may have the before-mentioned belief that hearing will dim, and these two ideas may be reinforced by a belief that age automatically makes you less a person, turning you into an individual who can no longer relate in the daily pattern of environment. The belief, you see, would work to insure the materialization of that state. [...] The physical apparatus itself, following your beliefs, will continue in health.

This is done by combining belief, emotion and imagination, and forming them into a mental picture of the desired physical result. [...]

Quite literally, you live in the body of your beliefs. You perceive through the body of your beliefs. Your beliefs can increase your vision or diminish it. [...]

Your effective power of action follows the lines of your beliefs. [...] To accept uncritically all beliefs that come to you is to open yourself to a barrage of conflicting data at best, in which the clear lines of action and power become blurred. [...] Beliefs of like nature attract each other, for you are bound to look for consistencies in your behavior and experience.

[...] You are not in touch with your own inner beliefs in that respect. Intellectually you have no use for those beliefs but emotionally they are still a part of you. [...]

Your part of the purpose of course was to witness Ruburt’s condition, and therefore give you an emotional realization of the nature of the nature of beliefs as they applied not only to the two of you, but to others. [...]

Some of this has to do with current mass beliefs, based on the idea of the mechanics of the body being more important than the thoughts behind the body’s working. [...] Certainly I have suggested in the past that he go out, but in line with the circumstances at the time, and the condition to which his beliefs had led him.

[...] While the reasons and beliefs as discussed in such sessions will still be valid, the suggestions that I give will be geared toward their application in given circumstances.

[...] For your particular purposes you also needed to be free of many strong emotional attachments—not because such attachments are not good, but because for you and your purposes they would blur the issues.

[...] The free association is valuable because it helps to point out those conflicting feelings and beliefs, brings them into consciousness, and into the present moment, where they can indeed be understood in the light of knowledge that has been acquired since — but not been allowed to act upon the old conflicting beliefs.

[...] All of this engendered some emotional reactions, but no tears. [...]

[...] You have instead a conglomeration of severely conflicting beliefs, so that there is no clear single road to action.

The expression of emotions in itself is an expression of action, of motion. [...]

Puberty comes at a certain time, triggered by deep mechanisms that are related to the state of the natural world, the condition of the species, and those cultural beliefs that in a certain sense you transpose upon the natural world. [...] And the scientists, for all their seeming independence, often simply found new intellectually acceptable reasons for unconsciously held emotional beliefs.

[...] These sexual beliefs are also far more important in national relationships than you realize, for you attempt to take what you think of as a masculine stance as a nation. [...] India takes a feminine stance — in terms of your beliefs, now.

Your beliefs so structure your experience individually and en masse, however, that evidential material contrary to those ideas shows itself but seldom, or in distorted or exaggerated form. [...]

[...] In some areas of your world, isolated peoples live on past a hundred years, vital and strong, because they are untouched by your beliefs, and because they live in sympathy and accord with the world as they know and understand it. [...]

It was propelled from inner reality to outward reality through belief, emotion and imagination. [...] Physically you can only see the results of an emotion, for instance. [...]

(Deliberately:) Imagination and emotions are the most concentrated forms of energy that you possess as physical creatures. Any strong emotion carries within it far more energy than, say, that required to send a rocket to the moon.

Your own thoughts and beliefs, having the same kind of inner reality, also transform the interior environments of others. [...]

[...] They generate emotion and imagination. [...]

His symptoms have been a fear of growth on the one hand, and on the other a way of effecting growth with safety, according to his beliefs. This session alone will help, as will his emotional recognition of his feelings, and your and his acceptance of their validity in their own realm. [...]

[...] The superstitions, horrendous beliefs and so forth, came to him through letters, and through the reading he began after his initial experience. [...]

[...] It is a fact that fears were hidden, that caused body beliefs to operate.

The body beliefs then grew up to answer that need. [...]

[...] Some of your private and joint problems spring from cultural beliefs that you are intellectually aware of, but not emotionally free from. [...]

[...] Ruburt is faced with the sensation of tightness, however—there is something there in his experience to deal with, so that his senses can conform to his belief about his body. [...] How many times have you said that to yourself—yet in that statement lies great freedom, for you must change your belief.

[...] That kind of painting can be excellent, but it also involves an intense immersion in the emotions, to the exclusion of any important conceptualizing. [...]

[...] Again, you recognize them, but you do not try to rise above them emotionally. [...]

[...] You project your present beliefs backward into history, and you misinterpret many of the conditions that you observe in the natural world. [...] Your beliefs, for example, cause you to deny the existence of emotions in animals, and any instances of love among them are assigned to “blind” instinct.

[...] As a result, the religions preached that only man had a soul and was dignified by emotional feelings. [...]

[...] Your beliefs lead you to suppose that a natural bisexuality would result in the death of the family, the destruction of morals, rampant sexual crimes, and the loss of sexual identity. [...]

The parent-child relationship has its own unique emotional structure, which survives even those distortions you have placed upon it, and its ancient integrity would not be weakened, but strengthened, if greater stress were laid upon your bisexual nature.

Another more personal core belief: “My life is worthless. [...] Now a person who holds such an idea will ordinarily not recognize it as an invisible belief. Instead he or she may emotionally feel that life has no meaning, that individual action is meaningless, that death is annihilation; and connected to this will be a conglomeration of subsidiary beliefs that deeply affect the family involved, and all those with whom such a person comes in contact.

Now if you are honest with your lists, you will finally come to what I call core beliefs, strong ideas about your own existence. Many other subsidiary beliefs, that earlier seemed separate from each other, should now appear quite clearly as being offshoots of core beliefs. [...] Once the core belief is understood to be a false one, the others will fall away.

Now let me give you a brief example of a core belief. It is a blanket belief: human nature is inherently evil. This is a core belief. [...] Experiences — both personal and global — will come into the perception of a person who holds this belief, that will only serve to deepen it further.

The shifting of belief may then open him to question his other beliefs, and he realizes that in the area of wealth, for example, he did very well because of his beliefs; but in those others, perhaps deeper experiences opened by his illness, he learns that human experience includes dimensions of reality that had earlier been closed to him, and that these are also easily within his reach — and without the illness that originally brought them forth. A new conglomeration of beliefs might emerge. [...]