“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

— and we will resume dictation. Give us a moment. (Pause.) Core beliefs are those about which you build your life. You are consciously aware of these, though often you do not focus your attention upon them. They become invisible, therefore, unless you become aware of the contents of your conscious mind.

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. 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.

(10:00.) Usually when you look into your conscious mind you do so for a particular reason, to find some information. But if you have schooled yourself to believe that such data is not consciously available, then it will not occur to you to find it in your conscious mind. If furthermore your conscious data is strongly organized about a core belief, then this will automatically make you blind to experience that is not connected with it.

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.

For example, here is a seemingly very innocent core belief: “I am a responsible parent.”

Now on the surface there is nothing wrong with that belief. If you hold to it and do not examine it, however, you may find that the word “responsible” is quite loaded, and collects other ideas that are equally unexamined by you. What is your idea of being responsible? According to your answer you can discover whether the core belief works to your advantage or not.

If responsible means, “I must be a parent twenty-four hours a day to the exclusion of everything else,” then you may be in difficulty, for that core belief might prevent you from using other abilities that exist quite apart from your parenthood.

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: The core belief just given is of one kind.

You hold some basic assumptions that are also core beliefs. To you they seem to be definitions. They are so a part of you that you take them for granted. Your idea of time is one.

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.

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.

You feed them, figuratively speaking, with like ideas. When you examine one such belief then you obviously threaten the integrity of the structure; and so there are ways of inserting new supports, so to speak — methods to tide you over. The whole core belief need not fall down upon you as you examine its basis.