“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session was witnessed by writer Richard Bach and his editor, Eleanor Friede. They flew into Elmira yesterday after poor weather had delayed their scheduled arrival on Tuesday in time for ESP class. Dick had also visited us in late August, when Seth had Chapter One of this book under way.

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.

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.

You may enjoy manipulating thoughts of time in your mind. You may find yourself thinking that time is basically different from your experience of it, but fundamentally you believe that you exist in the hours and the years, that the weeks come at you one at a time, that you are caught in the onrush of the seasons.

Naturally your physical experience reinforces this belief. You structure your perception, therefore, in terms of the lapses that seem to happen between events. This in itself forces you to concentrate your attention in one direction only, and discourages you from perceiving the events in your life in other fashions.

You may occasionally employ the association of ideas, one thought leading easily to another. When you do this you often perceive new insights. As the events fall apart from time continuity in your mind they seem to take on fresh vitality. You have unstructured them, you see, from the usual organization.

(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.

The structuring of beliefs is done in a highly characteristic yet individual manner, so you will find patterns that exist between various groupings, and one can lead you to another.

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.

(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.

(“Your consciousness attracts the consciousness that is already connected with the material. That is one of my goodies for the evening! Information, then, becomes new and is reborn as it is interpreted through a new consciousness, as Seagull was.

(“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.