“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To be human necessitates fine discrimination in the use of such consciousness. Many people are afraid of their own thoughts. They do not examine them. They accept the beliefs of others. Such actions distort data from both within and without.

There is no battle between the intuitive self and the conscious mind. There only seems to be when the individual refuses to face all the information that is available in his conscious mind. (Pause.) Sometimes it seems easier to avoid the frequent readjustments in behavior that self-examination requires. In such cases an individual collects many secondhand beliefs. Some contradict each other; the signals given to the body and to the inner self are not smoothly flowing or clear-cut, but a muddied jumble of counter-directions.

If you use your conscious mind properly, then, you examine those beliefs that come to you. You do not accept them willy-nilly. If you use your conscious mind properly, you are also aware of intuitive ideas that come to you from within. You are only half conscious when you do not examine the information that comes to you from without, and when you ignore the data that comes to you from within.

(10:13.) Many false beliefs therefore are indiscriminately accepted because you have not examined them. You have given the inner self a faulty picture of reality. Since it is the function of the conscious mind to assess physical experience, it [the inner self] hasn’t been able to do its job properly. If the inner portions of the self were supposed to have that responsibility, then you would not need a conscious mind.

The conscious mind is basically curious, open. It is also equipped to examine its own contents. Because of the psychological theories of the last century, many Western people believed that the primary purpose of the conscious mind was to inhibit “unconscious” material.

Left alone, the self acts spontaneously as a unit, but as an ever-changing one. Listening to voices both within and without, the conscious mind is able to form beliefs that are in league with the self’s knowledge as received from material and nonmaterial sources. Then examination of beliefs takes its place along with other activities — naturally, easily, without effort. Once the conscious mind has accepted a collection of conflicting beliefs, however, a definite attempt is necessary to sort these out.

There is no contradiction, though there may seem to be, between spontaneously being aware of your thoughts, and examining them. You do not have to be blind to be spontaneous. You are not being spontaneous when you indiscriminately accept as your own, for a fact, every bit of data that comes to you.