“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To become acquainted with your own ideas and beliefs you must walk among them, symbolically speaking, without blinders. You must look through the structures that you have yourself created, the organized ideas upon which you have grouped your experience.

To see clearly into your own mind you must first of all unstructure your thoughts, follow them without judging them, without comparing them to the framework of your beliefs.

The core belief, because of its intensity and because of your habits, will often tend to attract to itself others of a like nature. They will hang on. 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. This can develop to such an extent that all of your experience is seen only in relationship to this idea-growth. (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.

You may begin to perceive all physical data through the eyes of that core belief alone. You will not look out upon physical reality with the wonder of a child any more, or with the unstructured curiosity of an individual, but always through parental eyes. Thus you will close yourself off from much of physical experience.

Now telepathically you will also attract unconscious data that fits into this rigid pattern, according to the strength and stubbornness of this idea and whether or not you are willing to deal with it. You may narrow your life still further, all information of any kind finally becoming relatively invisible to you unless it touches upon your parental reality.

As you apprehend them through association you come quite close to examining the contents of your mind in a free fashion. But if you drop the time concept and then view the conscious content of your mind through other core ideas, you are still structuring. I am not saying that you should never organize those contents. I am saying that you must become aware of your own structures. Build them up or tear them down, but do not allow yourself to become blind to the furniture of your own mind.

You can stub your toe as easily on a misplaced idea as you can upon an old chair. It will help you, in fact, if you think of your own beliefs as furniture that can be rearranged, changed, renewed, completely discarded or replaced. Your ideas are yours. They should not control you. It is up to you to accept those that you choose to accept.

(10:35.) There will be no mystery. You know what your own beliefs are. You will see the groupings, but it is up to you to look inside your own mind and to use the images in your own way. Throw out ideas that do not suit you. If you read this, find such an idea in yourself and then say, “l cannot throw this idea away,” then you must realize that your inner remark is in itself a belief. You can indeed throw the idea away, the second one, as easily as the first.

You are not powerless before ideas. Using this analogy, you will certainly find some furniture that you did not expect. Do not simply look in the center of your inner room of consciousness; and make sure that you are on guard against the certain invisibility that was mentioned earlier (in this chapter), where an idea, quite available, appears to be a part of reality instead.

The idea of being the responsible parent, for example, may lead quite easily to other psychic structures involving responsibility, so that data is accepted on its own value. You may even think that it is wrong to view any situation except through your parental status.

The belief in guilt therefore would be a cementing structure that would hold together other similar core beliefs, and add to their strength. You must understand that these are not simply dead ideas, like debris, within your mind. They are psychic matter. In a sense then they are alive. They group themselves like cells, protecting their own validity and identity.

(Some notes added later: Dick Bach felt that he didn’t really write Seagull himself. By now the story of that book’s conception is well known: Late one night in 1959, Dick was walking beside a canal near a West Coast beach when he heard a voice say, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” No one else was around. He was astonished. He was even more so when, on his return home, the voice initiated images that gave him the bulk of the book in three-dimensional form. Then it stopped. On his own Dick tried unsuccessfully to finish the manuscript. Nothing happened until one day eight years later, when he suddenly wakened to hear the voice again — and with it came the rest of the book.

(To Jane, these states are all aspects of the same kind of highly accelerated creativity that finally “goes beyond itself” into levels — or aspects — of reality that we don’t understand clearly yet. The whole question is also relevant in cases involving automatic writing, painting, singing, musical composition, etc.

(“The inner portion of your being, using those abilities that have always been yours, interpreted the information through the kaleidoscope of your own being, using the best portions of yourself — producing, then, a brilliant truth in new clothes — but in clothes that no one could have given it but yourself. Now I will tell you: If you assign the authorship of Seagull to another, then you deny the uniqueness of your own inner self.

(“The truth came to you and was given to you, but the originality and uniqueness was provided by your own inner being, which may now be so separated from your conscious self that it seems to be apart from it.

(“Ruburt already has a head start on this, so I am not spoiling his fun. There are indeed ‘aspects’ of your own consciousness that operate in completely different environments. Environments, for example, that are not physical. There are aspects of you, therefore, that know many other kinds of information than those available to you at the conscious level now….”