“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] The entire drama would involve the “evolution” of an emotion or belief. [...]

[...] He might at another time appear as a dictator, cruel and overbearing, where he would represent an entirely different framework of feeling and belief He might show himself as a young monarch, signaling a belief that “youth is king.” [...]

[...] The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts (and very vividly, too). I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own — but (louder) the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama. [...]

[...] Man would not be able to recall past acts, judge them against the present situation, or imagine the future sense of guilt that might result.

[...] When a man kills another, regardless of his other beliefs a certain portion of his conscious mind is always aware of the violation involved, justify it though he may.

[...] So man loses full use of the animals’ regulated, graceful instinct, and yet denies the conscious and emotional discrimination given him instead.

“The thought occurred to me that perhaps Seth’s remarks (in sessions 724 and 732) were more pertinent to the situation than we imagined. [...] Do counterparts slide in and out of interconnections, according to needs, beliefs, and the experience of the present personalities involved?

[...] You think that this is just your “imagination.” [...] You would not be alive, in your terms, if first you did not imagine yourself as you are. [...]

[...] Instead, during the last week he let his own creative imagination go wherever it might while he held the general idea in his mind. [...]

To me, beside whatever relationship it might have with counterpart reality, the soul-mate belief embodies strongly distorted versions of the ideas contained in the two Seth passages quoted above.

[...] In fact, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining a situation in which Seth wonders if Jane is a secondary personality with an obsessive belief in some improbable physical reality. [...]

Imagine further this poor creature having a brain to go with each face, and each brain interprets reality in terms of the world it looks upon. [...] At the same time, imagine that these two creatures are really one, but with definite parts equipped to handle two entirely different worlds.

It is not a neutral energy but one of strong emotional impact, reassuring, and in an odd way, personified — warm and amazingly immediate. [...]

[...] Curious thought — I can also imagine some good-humored game of musical chairs in which I try to get out of my body, while Seth tries to get into it. [...]

Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. [...] Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.

(Pause.) They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. [...] Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords. [...]

[...] It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. [...]

Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. [...]

[...] We not only want to give necessary background information relative to the sessions themselves, but to offer glimpses into the very complicated emotional and physical forces that lie beneath close long-term relationships. We think Seth’s comments about our situations can help the reader better understand his or her own beliefs, motives, and desires.

(10:19.) Without this experience of following such a belief in the church so fervently, however, he would not understand the need of people for such beliefs, or be able to reach them as well as he does. His questioning mind was exercised originally as he began to examine religious beliefs. [...]

[...] Sometimes he feels lost, however, as an emotional human being, groping toward that potential, and he needs to be comforted. As you know now, comforting him can be frightening to you, because it returns you both to deep emotional realizations and feelings that you sublimate in your paintings, and even to mystical experiences that you also channel through your work.

He was always highly imaginative, as was his mother. [...]

[...] I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I’d also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16: “Many of Ruburt’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”

[...] You are learning how to form reality from your own beliefs, while having at the same time the freedom to choose those beliefs—to chose your mental state in a way that the animals, for example, do not. [...]

The belief in sin and in the sinful self has been for uncounted centuries embedded in man’s concepts about himself and God. Around those beliefs civilizations evolved and religions orbited. [...]

Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception: It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds…. [...]

(11:42.) Now Ruburt has been concentrating upon the symptoms, imagining this or that, often not responding to the moment as it is, but to imagined future events and moments filled with threat or difficulty. [...]

[...] Your cells were even aware in their way of your emotion. [...]

[...] You are also surrounded by imaginative events, however, here, in the terms of our discussion. [...]

[...] His momentary belief allowed improvement. [...]

[...] With your great belief in technology, it often seems to many people that television causes violence, for example, or that it causes a love of overmaterialism, or that it causes “loose morals.” [...] They are creative reflectors, acutely aware of the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the age.

(9:40.) Now for a moment let us imagine that physical events occur in the same fashion — that you choose those which flash upon the screen of your experience. [...]

Such events occur as a result of individual beliefs, desires, and intents. [...]

My piece is naturally tailored to my own beliefs and needs, of course, and some of its implications may become clearer to readers as Seth continues with his framework material in Mass Events. [...]

[...] Quite practically your personal and practical interest in immortality will give the impetus, the emotional impetus that will indeed allow me to deliver what you want. [...] Emotions are more important than you suppose. [...]

[...] Let us for example consider the following circumstances, which are happening only in our imagination. [...]

[...] A personality without basic stability would not serve my purposes, and a personality that was too rigid in its beliefs and abilities would not serve my purposes well.

You are not so gullible, nor am I, to suppose that those who do not want to accept evidence will ever accept the strongest evidence imaginable. [...]

[...] I must have gotten to the point where I thought, “Okay, if you’re afraid to trust yourself completely, and your own life, let’s take a taste of what it’s like to have no other place to turn but the world of conventional medicine and beliefs.” [...] I’m not denying that such a framework has its good points, but the overall picture is really far worse than I’d imagined. [...]

[...] I’m sure there is more coming to me intuitively, and I hope emotionally, that will give my life the impetus that I need. [...]

[...] Jane also cried on the waterbed that now “it would be harder to do anything on our own, because we had to deal with the medical establishment too,” as well as our own beliefs. [...]

(“Well,” I said to Jane after class, as we discussed the Chinese-American situation cited by Seth, “I don’t know about counterpart relationships in other kinds of realities, but it’s certainly obvious that at least some physical counterparts can hate each other …” So the larger self, I thought, would be quite capable of seeking experience through its parts in every way imaginable. [...] Within its great reaches it would transform its counterparts’ actions in ways that were, quite possibly, beyond our emotional and intellectual grasp. [...]

[...] And if an individual strongly disliked a counterpart in another land, wouldn’t this quality of emotion be detrimentally reflected in the person doing the hating?

(In Chapter 19 of Personal Reality, I found this line of Seth’s in the 667th session for May 30, 1973:) For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

Quite literally, the “inner” self forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts …

(Jane said tonight that she still feels a strong emotional charge in connection with the idea of the “dead” returning in those stereotyped, banal terms. [...]

Many have seen that inner world as the source for the physical one, but imagined that man’s purpose was merely to construct physically these perfect images to the best of his abilities. [...]

“When you are working with your beliefs, find out what you really think about the dream condition, for if you trust it, it can become an even more important ally because of your conscious cooperation.”

[...] (Doing this always reminds us of additional points to cover, of course!) Putting it all together is an extremely challenging endeavor as I try to summarize our years of committment to the Seth material—for inevitably we end up dealing with ideas lying outside society’s generally accepted frameworks of belief. Forty-one days have now passed since Jane left the hospital, and this passage of “time” alone has given us more perspective on the whole affair of her illness, and on our beliefs, intents, and desires.

[...] In verbal terms, however, those are the beliefs (if you will) of each c-e-l-l (spelled). They are imprinted in each chromosome, in each atom. [...] Those ingrained beliefs are of course biologically pertinent, providing the impetus of all growth and development.

[...] Whether or not reincarnation has been proven objectively, the belief structures surrounding that concept, or even the idea of it, have served very well as a forum within which certain present-life challenges have been worked out, through the therapists’ use of hypnosis, allegory, association, symbolism, and other very respectable methods.

[...] She doesn’t want to use the concept as a crutch; her caution stems from other beliefs, on which I’ll quote her shortly. [...]

[...] If we truly owe our physical existence to the chance conglomeration of certain atoms and molecules in the thickening scum of a primordial pond or ocean [to discuss only mankind here], then certainly we’ll never come this way again in the universe; and moreover, our emotional and intellectual attributes must rest upon the same dubious beginning. Aside from the lack of evidence to back up such “scientific” speculations, what thinking or feeling values, I wonder, can make such a belief system so attractive? [...] To imagine that such an entire environment is an accident is intellectually outrageous and emotionally sterile.”

[...] Once it’s created, each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals.

So when you think of your beliefs and who you are, you must also think of your species, and how you are told your species came to be. For your private beliefs are also based upon those theories, and the beliefs, culturally, of your times.

[...] For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

[...] You must try to stretch your imagination and feel these realities, because the intellect alone cannot comprehend them. [...]

[...] You are not imprisoned in time unless you believe that you are, and there is nothing more important than belief. [...]

[...] You need to learn the power of thought and emotion, but this should fill you with the joy of creativity. [...]

28. Seth’s remarks here are actually an extension of a long discussion on individual beliefs and spontaneity that he’d initiated in a class session two weeks ago: “Now, my words will not, I hope, be used to begin a new dogma. [...] There is nothing wrong with your emotions, or feelings, or being. [...]

[...] Rather, my emotional behavior does not follow your patterns — that is closer to “the truth.” I have long delegated your kind of emotional activity to what you would call unconscious behavior. [...]

[...] It is somewhat like having to free a particular word from a strong emotional association. [...]

[...] None of the communications from me have been in any way conducive to a development toward mental or emotional instability. [...]

[...] Simultaneously these other streams of perception and consciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

[...] According to your education, beliefs, and background you may interpret these in any number of ways. [...]

[...] You actually imagine that the ego is a very weak portion of the self, that it must defend itself against other areas of the self that are far stronger and more persuasive and indeed more dangerous; and so you have trained it to wear blinders, and quite against its natural inclinations.

[...] You imagine your universe as extending outward in space (and backwards in time). [...]

[...] Hanging up, he closed his eyes and imagined energy being sent out from a universal source through his own body, and directed toward the person in need. [...]

[...] Emotional connections are set up and form their own set of coordinates. [...]

The psychic and emotional communication, then, cut through physical coordinates. [...]

[...] I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. (Very long pause.) The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. [...]

Ironically, as individuals and nations we talk about casting off old beliefs while cherishing them as long as possible. [...] Within our national orientations, within our religious and secular, scientific and artistic structures, we are choosing to go to the extremes of “good” and “bad,” and to deal with the consequences, all stewing together in what seems like an impossible mix of reason and emotion, learning and joy, pain and violence, and life and death. [...]

(A one-minute pause at 9:23.) You may need some time before the old beliefs become less prominent, and finally fall into their proper decay—a decay, incidentally, that does indeed have its own kind of majesty, energy, and beauty. [...]

[...] Without knowing anything, I know that we’ll need much time in which to understand all of the deeply moving and conflicting emotional, psychic, and intellectual events connected with this development. [...]