“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I repeat: Your ideas and beliefs form the structure of your experience. Your beliefs and the reasons for them can be found in your conscious mind. If you accept the idea that the reasons for your behavior are forever buried in the past of this life, or any other, then you will not be able to alter your experience until you change that belief. I am speaking now of more or less normal experience. Later we will discuss more particular areas, such as circumstances in which illnesses date from birth.

(10:06. Seth-Jane, deep in thought, paused.) Much has been written about the nature and importance of suggestion. One of the current ideas in vogue holds that you are constantly at the mercy of suggestion. Your own conscious beliefs are the most important suggestions that you receive. All other ideas are rejected or accepted according to whether or not you believe they are true, in line with the steady conscious chattering that goes on within your mind most of the day — the suggestions given to you by yourself.

You will accept a suggestion given by another only if it fits in with your own ideas about the nature of reality in general, and your concepts about yourself in particular.

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.

Remember, even false beliefs will seem to be justified in terms of physical data, since your experience in the outside world is the materialization of those beliefs. So you must work with the raw material of your ideas, even while your sense data may tell you that a given belief is obviously a truth. To change your experience or any portion of it, then, you must change your ideas. Since you have been forming your own reality all along, the results will follow naturally.

(Pause.) You must be convinced that you can alter your beliefs. You must be willing to try. Think of a limiting idea as a muddy color and your life as a multidimensional painting that is marred. You change the idea as an artist would his palette.

The artist does not identify with the colors he uses. He knows he chooses them, and applies them with a brush. So you paint your reality with your ideas in the same manner. You are not your ideas, nor even your thoughts. You are the self who experiences them. If a painter finds his hands stained with pigment at the end of a day, he can wash the stain off easily, knowing its nature. If you think that limiting thoughts are a portion of you, permanently attached therefore, you will not think of washing them off. You would behave instead like a mad artist who says, “My paints are a part of me. They have stained my fingers, and there is nothing I can do about it.”

Previous limiting ideas, accepted, figuratively form a restraining bed, gathering other such material so that your mind becomes filled with debris. When you are spontaneous, you accept the free nature of your mind and it spontaneously makes decisions as to the validity or non-validity of data it receives. When you refuse to allow it this function it becomes cluttered.

No apple tree tries to grow violets. Quite automatically it knows what it is, and the framework of its own identity and existence. (Pause.) You have a conscious mind, but this is only the “topmost” portion of your mind. Much more of “it” is available to you. Much more of your knowledge can be conscious, therefore; but a false belief, a limiting one, is as ambiguous to your nature as any apple tree’s idea that it was a violet plant.

The ego is your idea of your physical image in relation to the world. Your self image is not unconscious, then. You are quite aware of it, though often you reject certain thoughts about it in favor of others. False beliefs can result in a rigid ego that insists upon using the conscious mind in one direction only, further distorting its perceptions.

Often you quite consciously decide to bury a thought or an idea that might cause you to alter your behavior, because it does not seem to fit in with limiting ideas that you already hold. Listen to your own train of thought as you go about your days. What suggestions and ideas are you giving yourself? Realize that these will be materialized in your personal experience.

Many quite limiting ideas will pass without scrutiny under the guise of goodness. You may feel quite virtuous, for example, in hating evil, or what seems to you to be evil; but if you find yourself concentrating upon either hatred or evil you are creating it. If you are poor you may feel quite self-righteous in your financial condition, looking with scorn upon those who are wealthy, telling yourself that money is wrong and so reinforcing the condition of poverty. If you are ill you may find yourself dwelling upon the misery of your condition, and bitterly envying those who are healthy, bemoaning your state — and therefore perpetuating it through your thoughts.