“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:10.) Many of Ruburt’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the Sinful Self has been very stubborn. 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 choose your mental state in a way that the animals for example do not. [...]

(Long pause at 8:53.) When it seems that left alone Ruburt’s condition will only worsen, you are following those old patterns of conditioned thought, projecting negative situations into the future, imagining the unfortunate outcome or outcomes, and acting as if you operated within a closed system. [...]

It is true that the Sinful Self carries with it a group of patterns or reactions; methods of dealing with problems, and so Ruburt’s beliefs along those lines have colored his reactions, his plans, his dealings with you through the years. [...]

[...] If they were isolated in spatial terms, they extended their imaginations and to some extent their lives and emotions both backward into the past and ahead into the future in ways that modern psychology has made most difficult. [...]

[...] I mentioned that modern psychology actually short-changed you, trying to fit itself into Darwinian beliefs. Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present. [...]

[...] People just before the earthquake even related imaginatively not only to their own ancestors, but to their children’s children after their own deaths, as those children lived their lives in the same locations, in the same land area. [...]

[...] So there are different emotional connections along those lines. [...]

[...] Symbolically, you see, and beneath it all, both men showed characteristics that under different circumstances could have led them into violence for the sake of their beliefs.

A belief must not possess. [...]

There is a connection here between last night’s episode, and the emotionally charged psychological climate behind the overt behavior itself: the behavior for example was not violent in any way.

[...] Concentration, an imagined journey, any exercise that is intense and diverting is beneficial. [...]

In the dream state you allow yourself greater freedom, trying out certain ideas and beliefs in this more plastic framework. You may therefore accept new beliefs initially in the dream state, and the intellectual or emotional realization may only come “later.” [...]

You will accept from your dreams that information that largely agrees with your waking conscious beliefs. There is interaction, as mentioned previously, in which new beliefs are tried out, so to speak. [...]

New paragraph: While your beliefs do structure much of your dream activity, other issues are also involved simply because the focus of your awareness is not acutely directed toward physical reality, but is only opaquely concerned with it.

[...] When you consider survival after death, for instance, you imagine all the senses fully operating, though perhaps in a nonphysical body. [...]

[...] Imagined fears, projected into the future, put the body in a state of stress unknown to the animal. When you feel that your world is not safe the body may respond in many ways, according to the characteristic temperament and beliefs. [...]

[...] In the past you have reinforced each other’s beliefs in an unsafe universe. These beliefs have become a part of your private and joint realities, affecting you (me) invisibly as they affect Ruburt visibly.

The world-view consists of those cultural and private beliefs concerning cultural, economic and social environments. [...]

[...] You each share some general beliefs that the rest of the world is a threat. [...]

[...] You cannot exactly say that each object is a symbol of a belief that specifically, and yet any alterations that you willfully make in your behavior with the objects of your intimate environment represent alterations of beliefs. [...] When you change a room around you are altering beliefs in an observable way.

[...] They should be accepted, for they often show conflicting beliefs that are then out in the open and more easily contended with, because a specific incident will usually be involved.

He at least wished he could go into the yard this afternoon, once he imagined that he could make that step out. [...]

I have mentioned this before, but your environment is a symbol of your inner life and beliefs; one appears physical to you while the inner life does not. [...]

(9:23.) The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with. [...]

[...] He is managing to disentangle himself from many disadvantageous cultural beliefs — beliefs that both of you for years, like other people, took for granted.

You might combat those beliefs, struggle against them, but they still carried great weight. [...] The entire idea, or fear, that Ruburt had at one time of leading other people down the garden path, was based upon those old beliefs. [...]

[...] He is giving it a different picture of the world, and he is doing that because he has finally changed many of his old beliefs.

Your own value system then is built up of your beliefs about reality, and those beliefs form your experience. [...] To this end you attempt to deny all imperfect thoughts and emotions. [...]

Forget now that in this case such a division occurred, and imagine instead the successive thoughts and feelings that you possess. [...] Augustus’s case simply shows in exaggerated form the effects of your beliefs upon your physical image. [...]

[...] We think it of interest to include Seth’s letter in his book, since it stresses the importance of beliefs.)

Using this analogy, your mental and emotional life forms a framework composed of such structures, and these act directly upon the cells of your physical body.

[...] There he’s accepted as an independent spirit — a spirit guide by those with spiritualistic beliefs — or as some displaced portion of my own personality by the scientific community. [...]

While I was trying to define Seth that way and questioning whether or not he was a spirit guide, I was closed off to some extent from his greater reality, which exists in terms of vast imaginative and creative power that is bigger than the world of facts and can’t be contained in it. [...]

Intuitively and emotionally we often understand more than we intellectually realize. [...]

[...] In this book Seth is saying that you can change your experience by altering your beliefs about yourself and physical existence.

Ruburt was highly creative, and so following the beliefs of his time, he believed that he must watch his creativity most carefully, for he was determined to use it. [...] He loved you deeply, and does, but he always felt he had to tread a slender line, so as to satisfy the various needs and beliefs that you both had to one extent or another, and those you felt society possessed.

[...] They cannot imagine (pause), life’s “initial” creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity’s feminine basis. [...]

[...] Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. [...]

[...] No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs.

Ruburt (Jane) was highly creative, and so following the beliefs of his time, he believed that he must watch his creativity most carefully, for he was determined to use it. [...] He loved you deeply and does, but he always felt he had to tread a slender line, so as to satisfy the various needs and beliefs that you both had to one extent or another, and those you felt society possessed. [...]

[...] They cannot imagine (pause) life’s “initial” creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity’s feminine basis.

[...] Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. [...]

[...] No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs!

[...] You moved through belief systems, becoming to some extent disillusioned. You looked at the world and could no longer accept many of the basic beliefs upon which its fabric is socially founded. Many of the people who read my books are also disillusioned with the world’s beliefs. [...] They are afraid, however, of going out on their own, so to speak, and many are involved in lives that have been built upon past beliefs.

Often you are reacting to implied threats—either those you imagine in the future or remember from the past, so that you do not take the necessary comfort in the sense data of any given moment. [...] The imagined threats then cut down your feelings of security, adding anxieties for which the sense perceptions can directly find no reason.

(The last session, deleted, for June 27, had helped both Jane and me—at least once more we’d started the painful process of searching for insights into our belief systems. [...]

[...] They make multitudinous minute decisions at a much earlier age than is believed, as their own natures seek expression, and as those natures interact with the mental, emotional, and physical environment of the times in which they were born.

Earlier this evening you were discussing your beliefs, and beliefs is the name of the game. [...]

[...] You concentrate upon the annoyances of your neighbors lest you become too close to them and emotionally involved and touched. [...]

(To me:) You imagine a quiet home in the country—the dream in that regard in your mind, knowing full well you have no intentions of using “valuable time” to mow grass, fix pipes or tend to furnaces. [...]

[...] With the ideas of either buying a house or going to Florida, and what these issues involve in line with your current beliefs as given. [...]

[...] Instead, “psychic progress” is hampered by those very negative beliefs that we have tried to bring to your attention.

If you would know yourself in deepest terms, you must start with your own feelings, emotions, desires, intents and impulses. [...]

[...] You do not follow urges through that would hurt others physically, or that seem in direct contradiction to your present beliefs — but you do acknowledge them. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

Reality, then, is viewed through this system of beliefs. [...] People entertaining such beliefs are often very religious in conventional terms. Countries emphasizing like beliefs send missionaries to “convert” those who are pagan, and therefore inferior.

Now: Any intrusion of other beliefs here will be considered threatening. Both racial problems and religious dissension will be rationalized from the standpoint of these beliefs. [...] However, they may then use that concept to justify their belief in the inferiority of other races. [...]

[...] Now if you happen to be Protestant, male, white, American, rich, and healthy, at least within the framework of your beliefs you can look at yourself with “clear” eyes. [...] If however you hold this group of beliefs and you fall short — that is, if in some way you do not fit in — then even within that system you are in trouble.

Here we have a system of belief in which it is wrong to be white, American, or wealthy, or even at all well-off in financial terms. [...] 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.

[...] Imagine now that our inhabitants have been hypnotized into believing that they are in a small closed room. Their attention is completely focused within the imaginary room, with the result that all their concepts are based upon that belief.

[...] When conceptual thought develops far enough, then it is imagined that all energy originates from what seems to be a closed system; and this misconception then colors all deductions made concerning the nature of energy itself.

[...] However, imagine a small room, a very small room, into which a light Ping-Pong ball has been flung with great force so that it bounces back and forth against the narrow walls. [...]

[...] An emotional acceptance, distasteful as this may seem to Ruburt, is the answer here, and again a sensual immersion in the spacious present and in nature will refresh you here.

You are left with, as of now, the results of negative beliefs, projected upon certain portions of the body. [...] Even if you want to play it with him, it is extremely important that it is an “as if” imaginative game.

It has been acted out imaginatively and physically, with some changes and variations. [...] This scene will change not necessarily because of any particular effort to reenact the scene differently imaginatively, but because of the overall “as if” game. [...]

[...] It does no good to say “Why should such things be?” since you are here to learn how (underlined) thoughts, feelings and emotions are materialized physically.

Up to now you both have been playing the illness game strongly, in your imagination both creating symptoms, imprisoning Ruburt within them in the present, seeing them in the future, and examining future events in the light of present symptoms.

Ruburt’s intellect and his emotions, working together, work joyfully in his writing, his psychic endeavors, and his subjective experience in general. They unite and stimulate his creative abilities so that he does what comes naturally, easily and vitally to him, searching out his own view of reality—but in certain areas the intellect and the emotions begin to separate in their visions of the picture of the world. The intellect (long pause, eyes closed) disapproves of certain feelings and emotions because the intellect, allied with (pause) the social aspects of reality, thinks in terms of a public face, or respectability, of its position with other adults in the world. [...]

[...] For the purposes of this discussion, we must simplify, so we will say that generally speaking your own country aligns itself with the world of reason, while in the same fashion Iran allies itself with the world of emotion. [...] The same applies in any personality who attempts to separate the intellect and the emotions from their necessary unity within psychological structure. [...]

[...] The American response—generally, now, speaking—to Iranian emotionalism is to become still more self-righteously reasonable, cooler, more superior. The Iranian’s response to the Americans’ reason involves new outbursts of emotionalism and behavior that appear utterly irrational to the American view. [...]

[...] The intellect, however, wants the emotions to be perhaps more respectable than they are, neater, held better in check, well-dressed. [...] In Ruburt’s case, it began to worry that the exuberant, spontaneous, emotional parts of the self would allow their search for truth and creativity to get out of bounds, bringing some danger, perhaps, rather than honor—or at the very least scorn and criticism. [...]

[...] Beliefs are thoughts reinforced by imagination and emotion concerning the nature of your reality.

So — once more — you form reality through your beliefs, and your most intimate production is your physical body. Your beliefs about it are constantly fed into inner data. [...] But the blueprint is made by your conscious beliefs. To change your body you change your beliefs, even in the face of physical data or evidence that conflicts.

The inner self always attempts to maintain the body’s equilibrium and health, but many times your own beliefs prevent it from coming to your aid with even half of the energy available to it. Often only when you are in dire straits do you open up the doors to this great energy, when it is much too clear that your previous beliefs and behavior have not worked.

(Pause, one of many.) As soon as the need for such data — aid, information, or knowledge — arises, then it is immediately forthcoming unless your own conscious beliefs cause a barrier. [...]

[...] You cannot force them to change their beliefs. [...] To imagine that you or anyone else can lead large masses of persons astray is a highly erroneous conception. [...]

(That event, as well as the launching of the shuttle Sunday morning, had been very emotional doings for me, somewhat to my surprise. [...]

[...] The symptoms have fluctuated, serving sometimes one purpose more than the other—but what you have overall is a belief in a kind of braking power with which to handle spontaneous activity. [...]

Again, that belief in the need for control is rooted in the earlier concepts of the Sinful Self (long pause)—concepts that have come to the fore in current contemporary world events with the new attention being given to religious cults and religions. [...]