“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) People with like ideas reinforce each other’s beliefs. You may meet with some misunderstanding when you suddenly decide to change your reality by changing your beliefs — according to the circumstances, you may be going in a completely different direction than the group to which you belong. The others may feel it necessary to defend ideas that all of you previously took for granted. In such cases your beliefs merged. Each individual has his or her own ideas about reality for reasons that seem valid. Needs are met. When you abruptly change your beliefs, then in the group you no longer have the same position — you are not playing that game any longer.

Once more, if you think of daily life as an ever-moving three-dimensional painting with you as the artist, then you will realize that as your beliefs change so will your experience. You must accept the idea completely, however, that your beliefs form your experience. Discard those beliefs that are not bringing you those effects you want. In the meantime you will often be in the position of telling yourself that something is true in the face of physical data that seems completely contradictory. You may say, “I live amid abundance and am free from want,” while your eyes tell you that the desk is piled with bills. You must realize that you are the one who produced that “physical evidence” that still faces you, and you did so through your beliefs.

So as you alter the belief, the physical evidence will gradually begin to “prove” your new belief as faithfully as it did your old one. You must work with your own ideas. While there are general categories of beliefs, and general reasons for them, you must become personally aware of your own, for no one person is completely like any other. The old beliefs served a purpose and fulfilled a need.

In your daily physical life you are usually concerned simply with changing your beliefs about yourself, and then changing the beliefs others hold about you. You will find conflicting beliefs within yourself and you must become aware of these. As an example, you may believe that you want to understand the nature of your inner self — you may tell yourself you want to remember your dreams, but at the same time still hold a belief in the basic unworthiness of the self, and be quite frightened of remembering your dreams because of what you might find there.

Few beliefs are intellectual alone. [...] There are various ways of altering the belief by substituting its opposite. [...] You generate the emotion opposite the one that arises from the belief you want to change, and you turn your imagination in the opposite direction from the one dictated by the belief. At the same time you consciously assure yourself that the unsatisfactory belief is an idea about reality and not an aspect of reality itself.

Behind this would be the belief that any hurt was inherently a disaster. Such a belief could originate from an overanxious mother, for instance. If such a mother’s imagination followed her belief — as of course it would — then she would immediately perceive a great potential danger to her child in the smallest threat. Both through the mother’s actions, and telepathically, the child would receive such a message and react according to those understood beliefs.

(9:35.) So it is quite necessary that an acquiescence to belief does exist, particularly in early life. There is no reason, though, for an individual to be bound by childhood beliefs or experience. The nature of some such beliefs is that while seemingly obvious ones are recognized as harmful or foolish, others connected to them may not be so easily understood.

[...] (Pause.) Your beliefs always change to some extent. [...] By thirty, hopefully, you have dismissed such a belief, though it fit in very well and was necessary to you in your childhood. If your mother reinforced this belief telepathically and verbally through dire pictures of the potential danger involved in street crossing, however, then you would also carry within you that emotional fear, and perhaps entertain imaginative considerations of possible accident.

That, plus the need for money when you left Artistic, and the release from the fear, the belief, that welfare would take what he made. The blocks to the positive belief disappeared, and the belief reversed itself, and quickly. [...]

[...] He must understand that the basic belief mentioned is a faulty belief, projected upon reality, and not a picture of it. That is one belief that he has not been able to separate himself from.

There are a series of beliefs, built up like blocks one upon the other, that of course form his experience. [...] The ones that are less advantageous were used as methods of bringing about desired good ends—i.e., they were used in the service of “good beliefs.” [...]

[...] His father had money and was useless—according to early beliefs received from his mother. The father was also, with money now, sexually promiscuous, according to those beliefs.

(9:50.) This subject leads to what I will call bridge beliefs, and again Ruburt received some information on this topic ahead of time for his own benefit. (See the notes prefacing the last session.) As you examine your ideas you will discover that even some apparently contradictory ones have similarities, and these resemblances may be used to bridge the gaps between beliefs — even those that seem to be the most diverse. Because you are the individual who holds the beliefs you will stamp them, so to speak, with certain characteristics that you will recognize. These aspects will themselves emerge as bridge beliefs. [...] When you discover what they are, you will find a point of unity within yourself from which you can with some detachment, view your other systems of belief.

[...] Such bridge beliefs often allow you to perceive the “invisible” beliefs mentioned this evening, and these can then appear to you as a revelation. On second thought, however, you will realize that another belief blocked that one from your view, but that you were always aware of it; and that in a strange way it was also invisible because you took it for granted. You did not consider it a belief about reality but as reality itself, and never questioned it.

[...] There may be some “invisible beliefs,” and there may be one or two invisible core beliefs. These, following the analogy, would be hidden behind the other brighter, more obvious “planets,” and yet would show their presence through their effects upon your relationships with all of the other visible core beliefs in your “planetary system.”

[...] (See the 643rd session.) When she examined her beliefs this escaped her. The invisible belief, however, affected her behavior and experience. Now she understands it and can deal with it as belief, and not as a condition of reality over which she has no control.

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. [...]

It may be easy for you to see beliefs that are invisible to others in themselves. Reading this book, you may be able to point at friends or acquaintances and see clearly that their ideas are invisible beliefs which limit their experience — and yet be blind to your own invisible beliefs, which you take so readily as truth or characteristics of reality.

[...] 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.

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.

(Pause.) Because ideas and beliefs have this electromagnetic reality, then, constant interplay between those strongly contradictory beliefs can cause great power blocks, impeding the flow of inner energy outward. [...] Unassimilated beliefs, unexamined ideas, can seem to adopt a life of their own. [...]

[...] (Pause.) When you set your longing against a present belief there is always conflict. Your belief will generate the proper feelings and imaginative endeavors characteristic of it. If you want to be healthy and continually contrast what you want with the present conviction in your poor health, then the belief itself, set up against the desire, will cause added difficulties. [...] Desire and belief are not united but apart.

For a certain amount of time I will momentarily suspend what I believe in this area, and willfully accept the belief I want. [...] For that time desire and belief will be one. [...] For this period I will completely alter my old beliefs. Even though I sit quietly, in my mind I will act as if the belief I want were mine completely.

Let us give a simple example, using a positive belief instilled in childhood. [...] The person acts in line with this belief in all ways; but also a variety of subsidiary beliefs grow up about the main one.

[...] The “quacks” end up with those who are hopeless, who realize the ineffectiveness of other belief systems, find them wanting, and have no place to go. Some of the “quacks” may be unscrupulous and dishonest, yet many of them possess an intuitive understanding, and can work “cures” through the instant alteration of belief. [...] The fact is that such patients no longer believe in the doctors’ system of belief, and so could not be helped by them.

[...] A good physician is a changer of beliefs. [...] Whatever methods or drugs he uses will not be effective unless this change of belief takes place.

[...] Behind this is the psychic pattern of beliefs in which the patient often assigns to the doctor the powers of knowledge and wisdom that his beliefs have taught him he does not have. [...]

While you believe that only doctors can cure you, you had better go to them, because in the framework of your beliefs they are the only people who can help you. But the framework itself is limiting; and again, while you may be cured of one difficulty, you will only replace it with another as long as your beliefs cause you to have physical problems.

[...] If through the concentrated use of psychic energy your body is cured by such a healer, you will also simply trade those symptoms for others unless you change your initial beliefs. Now sometimes a healer or a doctor, with his effectiveness in healing a condition, will show you by inference that the healing energy was always within yourself, and this realization may be enough to allow you to change your beliefs about health entirely.

Now: in his beliefs Ruburt wrote recently that he had a good complexion, and always had one. He realized that this was often reinforced by you in your comments, and in this very simple instance you see the result of a joint belief freely carried through without conflicts. We will call it a simple declaratory belief. [...]

[...] A simple declarative belief, but it is qualified. [...] You believe you are a good artist—a simple declarative belief. Between the two beliefs however there is some conflict, since you believe you also need money for your self-respect, but that you cannot get it by being an artist, which you feel is your focus of identity, and highly concerned with self-respect.

Now: beginning my book as I suggested in the last session, Ruburt has begun to encounter, recognize and timidly begun to challenge body beliefs just in the last few days. [...] I’ll try it,” which allows a breathing space and a slight weakening of previous conditioning, in which he is no longer taking negative beliefs as fact, but looking at them as beliefs.

[...] Ruburt’s beliefs on his own, concerning his writing and money, carried the ball despite his worrying tendencies. You believed that his best work would bring money too, and so you had no conflicting beliefs about money in that regard.

As mentioned (in the 614th session in Chapter Two), the first important step is to realize that your beliefs about reality are just that — beliefs about reality and not necessarily attributes of reality. You must make a clear distinction between you and your beliefs. You must then realize that your beliefs are physically materialized. [...] To change the physical effect you must change the original belief — while being quite aware that for a time physical materializations of the old beliefs may still hold.

The only way out of it is to become aware of your beliefs, aware of your own conscious thought, and to change your beliefs so that you bring them more in line with the kind of reality you want to experience. Imagination and emotion will then automatically come into play to reinforce the new beliefs.

(A one-minute pause at 9:59.) It is your method of assessing temporal experience according to the beliefs that it holds about the nature of reality. [...] I cannot say this often enough: Your beliefs form your reality, your body and its condition, your personal relationships, your environment, and en masse your civilization and world.

Your beliefs automatically attract the appropriate emotions. They reinforce themselves through imagination; and at the risk of repeating myself, because this is so important: Imagination and feeling follow your beliefs. [...]

[...] There are an infinite number of such tributaries (probabilities), and through your beliefs you choose from these, adjusting their currents. For example: If you constantly focus on the belief that your early background was damaging and negative, then only such experiences will flow into your present life from the past. It does no good to say, “But my life was traumatic,” therefore reinforcing the belief. [...] (See the 644th session in Chapter Eleven.) From the present you have hypnotized yourself, viewing the past not as it was to your experience, but as it appears now in the light of your current beliefs.

No negative beliefs were thrust upon you, therefore, despite your will. [...] In that context both hold the belief in the resulting forgetfulness, and it is the power of belief that is being demonstrated. [...]

(Pause at 10:42.) We are going to deal with practical methods that will allow you to alter beliefs and change your experience. Later in the book we’ll show how your individual beliefs attract you to joys or disasters. We will also discuss the ways in which mass beliefs will bring many of you together both in great periods of celebration, or as victims or survivors of disasters that seem to exist apart from yourselves.

[...] The subject agrees to accept the beliefs of the hypnotist. Since telepathy exists (as described in Chapter Three), the subject will react not only to verbal commands but to the unspoken beliefs of the practitioner, thereby “proving,” of course, the hypnotist’s theory of what his profession is.

If you act upon a belief in freedom and exert it, then it will automatically show you by contrast that the prior belief in lack of freedom was not in basic terms realistic. The prior belief will be chipped away to that extent. At the same time you must of course work at understanding the prior belief. [...]

The core beliefs and the resulting subsidiary beliefs are interrelated and work back to back, one to the other. [...] There is a difference between saying “we danced,” to Ruburt, regardless of how well he danced, and the belief that he could not dance at all. [...]

The times that Ruburt managed rather considerable improvements even in the face of strong negative beliefs, were times when he managed to convince himself against all objective evidence that there was nothing wrong with him physically but habitual stiffness. That belief minimized the seeming impediments, allowed greater physical freedom that in its turn by contrast began to lessen the preliminary negative beliefs. [...]

[...] The feeling and belief in freedom must come before its physical manifestation, and this regardless of any beliefs to the contrary.

[...] (Pause.) Your beliefs generate emotion. [...] Your beliefs generate the appropriate emotion that is implied. [...] Instead, over a period of time you have been consciously entertaining negative beliefs that then generated the strong feelings of despondency.

One belief, of course, can be dependent upon many others, each generating its own emotion and imaginative reality. The belief in illness itself depends upon a belief in human unworthiness, guilt and imperfection, for example.

[...] As such it also portrays the importance of belief, for using hypnosis you “force-feed” a belief to yourself, or one given to you by another — a “hypnotist”; but you concentrate all of your attention upon the idea presented.

Here, as in normal life, your emotions and actions follow your beliefs. [...] There is much written about the nature of healing, and there will be material in this book dealing with it, but there is also healing-in-reverse, in which case an individual loses a belief in his or her health and accepts instead the idea of personal illness.

I would like you to recognize your own beliefs in several areas. You must realize that any idea you accept as truth is a belief that you hold. [...] You will, I hope, learn to disregard all beliefs that imply basic limitations.

(12:15.) These are all beliefs held by many people. [...] Physical data will always seem to reinforce the beliefs, therefore, but the beliefs formed the reality. [...]

You form the fabric of your experience through your own beliefs and expectations. [...] You take your beliefs about reality as truth, and often do not question them. [...]

(9:45.) It is far simpler to recognize your own beliefs in regard to religion, politics or similar subjects, than it is to pinpoint your deepest beliefs about yourself and who and what you are — particularly in relationship with your own life.

Your daily experience will be affected by your race, your beliefs about it, your beliefs about other races, and the climate of opinion in general. [...] If you belong to a minority or if you are black, then you may be caught in a conflict of beliefs.

[...] You will be born in the midst of certain mass beliefs, and these may vary according to the country of your nativity. As you come into your body with all of its physical surroundings, so at birth do you emerge into a rich natural psychological environment in which beliefs and ideas are every bit as real.

(9:55.) Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. [...] Those reactions will add to the prevailing beliefs and in turn affect the individual.

Some of you will have a contradictory belief that poverty is virtuous, and that wealth is a vice and represents evidence of a spiritual lack. (See the 614th session in Chapter Two.) This belief in your society also harks back to the Bible and Christ’s association with the poor rather than the rich.

As time went on the number of unexamined, frightening beliefs began to accumulate. Ideas and beliefs do feed upon themselves. [...] Over the years two opposing systems of beliefs built up strongly, vying for Augustus’s attention. [...] In this line of beliefs he was able to do anything — cure mankind’s ills if he chose, or withhold such knowledge from the world to punish it. [...]

[...] Conflicting beliefs were uncritically accepted. (Pause.) The conscious mind will always attempt to make sense out of its beliefs, to form them into patterns and sequences. It will usually organize ideas in as rational a way as possible, and dispense with those that seem to contradict the overall system of its beliefs.

(Pause at 9:50.) Since it is the beliefs of the conscious mind that regulate the involuntary bodily motions and the entire physical system, then contradictory beliefs obviously set up adverse physical reactions and imbalances. Before Augustus’s opposing beliefs lined themselves up into separate camps, so to speak, the body was in continual turmoil; contradictory messages were constantly sent to the muscular system and the heart. [...]

[...] The conscious mind, again, tries to obtain overall integrity and unity, lining up its beliefs into some kind of consistent system. When opposing beliefs that directly contradict each other are held for any length of time, and little attempt is made to reconcile them, then a “battle” begins within the conscious mind itself.

[...] If you discover that you feel unworthy, then do not simply try to apply a more positive belief over that one. Instead discover the reasons for your first belief. [...]

If you allow yourself to be more and more aware of your own beliefs, you can work with them. It is silly to try to fight what you think of as negative beliefs, or to be frightened of them. [...]

New sentence: For example, many of the young believe at one time or another that their parents are omnipotent — a very handy belief that gives children a sense of security. Grown into adolescent years, the same offspring are then shocked to discover their parents to be quite human and fallible, and another conviction often takes over: a belief in the inadequacy and inferiority of the older generations, and in the rigidity and callousness of those who run the world.

For a while the new adults often feel themselves to be invincible, beyond the boundaries of creaturehood, even; this belief, again, endows them with the strength and energy they need to begin a life for themselves and to form their own mass world. Yet in material terms they must all realize, sooner or later, not only the challenges but the other peculiar characteristics of creaturehood, in which basically no such generalized beliefs make sense.

Luckily Andrea is working with her own system of beliefs. [...] So she feels and acts less attractive — when that belief holds sway. She is fortunate enough to be able to check her physical experience against her beliefs, and astute enough to see areas in which she has made great advances. But let us look at some of those beliefs and apply them to others generally.

Conscious beliefs focus your attention, channel it and direct your energy so that you can swiftly bring the ideas into your physical experience. They also act as blinders, throwing aside data that cannot be assimilated while preserving the integrity of the beliefs. So our Andrea did not see, or ignored, the smiles that came her way, or the encouragement; and in some cases she even perceived some potentially beneficial events as “negative” — these then were used to further reinforce the belief in her own inferiority.

Over the phone Ruburt reminded Andrea of her own basic uniqueness, and also of the fact that she was creating her reality through beliefs. Ruburt reinforced other ideas that Andrea had momentarily forgotten — the fact, among others, of her own true worth; and because Ruburt believed in Andrea’s worth, and because Andrea knew it, this more positive belief rose up to shove the others aside.

During the day, Andrea was able to look at both beliefs and see them as opposing ideas that she had held about herself. [...] At various times one belief would color her experience nearly to the exclusion of the other. [...]

Structured beliefs collect and hold your experience, packaging it, so to speak; and so when you look at a given experience that seems like another, you put it into the same structured package, often without examination. Such beliefs can hold surprises; when you lift up the cover of one you may find that it has served to hide valuable information that did not belong there. An artificial grouping of ideas, like paper flowers, can be collected about a standard core belief.

The core belief, because of its intensity and because of your habits, will often tend to attract to itself others of a like nature. [...] If you are not accustomed to examining your own mind, then you can allow separate growths of this kind to form about a belief until you cannot distinguish one from the other. [...] (Seth called for the hyphen.) Data that seems unrelated to this core belief is then not assimilated but thrown into the corners of your mind, unused, and you are denied the value of the information.

A core belief is invisible only when you think of it as a fact of life, and not as a belief about life; only when you identify with it so completely that you automatically focus your perceptions along that specific line.

Now on the surface there is nothing wrong with that belief. [...] According to your answer you can discover whether the core belief works to your advantage or not.

Far from beliefs being embedded in the so-called unconscious, they are relatively speaking more plastic there. Beliefs are strongest at precisely the point of conscious impact upon the physical environment. The belief, any belief, is a conscious formation of ideas that are accepted as physical truth. The energy for the beliefs comes from other levels, of course. Without the energy the beliefs would wither.

It is true that his beliefs are also responsible for the fact that he can experience such alterations to begin with. While his beliefs are partially responsible for his astonishing facility, once in various altered states he is in a kind of free-wheeling situation as far as physical reality is concerned. [...]

[...] When Ruburt utilizes other focuses and turns his consciousness in other than directly-physical areas, when he turns several angles away, then to some extent (underlined) he frees himself to some degree from beliefs, but certainly from their effects. [...]

[...] In certain stages of consciousness, beliefs can be changed more easily, but there must be of course an insertion from the normal egotistical level in most (underlined) instances.