“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In physical life, your conscious mind is largely dependent upon the workings of your physical brain. You have a conscious mind whether you are in flesh or out of it, but when you are physically oriented, then it is connected to the physical brain.

The brain to some extent keeps the mind to a three-dimensional focus. It orients you toward the environment in which you must operate, and it is because of the mind’s allegiance with the temporal brain that you perceive, for example, time as a series of moments.

The brain channels the information that the mind receives to your physical structure, so that your experience is physically sifted and automatically translated into terms that the organism can understand. (Seth-Jane spoke emphatically, rapping upon the coffee table between us.) Because of this, physically speaking and in life as you think of it, the mind is to a large extent dependent upon the brain’s growth and activity. There is some information necessary to physical survival that must be taught and handed down from parent to child. There are basic assumptions of a general nature with which you are born, but because the specific conditions of your environment are so various, these must be implemented. So it is necessary that the child accept beliefs from its parents.

(9:27.) This provides leeway until the conscious mind is able to reason for itself and provide its own value judgments. Later I will discuss greater aspects of the origin of ideas, but for now we will simply speak in terms of this life, the one you know.

The early ideas given to you by your parents, then, structure your learning experiences themselves. They set the safe boundaries within which you can operate in early years. Quite without your conscious knowing — because your mind, connected with its brain, is not that developed — your imagination is set along certain roads.

Many such beliefs lie quite within the conscious mind. The grown adult, not used to examining his or her own beliefs, however, may be quite unaware of harboring such an idea. The idea itself is not buried or unconscious. It is simply unexamined.

So one of the most hampering beliefs of all, as earlier mentioned (in the 614th session in Chapter Two, for instance), is the idea that the clues to current behavior are buried and usually inaccessible. This belief itself closes to you the contents of your own conscious mind and prevents you from looking there for the answers that are available.

(I told Jane I’d thought of using the pendulum after the session to get at the cause of the hand phenomenon, since I didn’t want to interrupt book dictation by asking Seth about it. [Briefly for those who have asked me: The pendulum is a very old method. I use it, with excellent results, to obtain ideomotor — “subconscious” — responses about knowledge that lies just outside my usual consciousness. I hold a small heavy object suspended by a thread so that it’s free to move. By mentally asking questions, I obtain “yes” or “no” answers according to whether the pendulum swings back and forth, or from side to side.]

First of all, it is within your conscious mind. The pendulum would be a method of allowing you to view conscious material that is not structured to recognized beliefs. I want you to understand that, for the reader does not have the benefit of my talking to him personally in this way.

The belief is conscious. You are well aware of it, but you are not aware of those that cling to it. The belief is that you do not communicate well with your mother.

Instead, on your return you are communicating to the world through your notes — a choice you made consciously, but without being aware of the other contents of your conscious mind, and the “conflicting” beliefs. Do you follow me?

These mentioned beliefs are obvious enough when I tell you of them, but their opposing natures gave confusing data to the body consciousness: Write and do not write.

Your mother’s “condition,” you believe, involves a lack of communication. Your brother told you about her occasionally faltering speech. Now your quite conscious interpretation of an apt kind of self-punishment was a lack of hand motion. I am trying to put this simply so you can follow the connections.

Because you believe your method of expression is primarily through your hand in painting, and you believe your mother’s to be vocal, you tampered with your hand’s motion — not, for example, your speech. Can you follow that consciously?

Now at various times you made those conscious choices. They escaped your notice but they existed as conscious points of awareness and choice. Now do you have any questions?

Now: Ruburt has recently been in the process of recognizing some beliefs that he wants to get rid of. He has been loosening them so that they rattle around within his consciousness. He is becoming aware of them. They are not as invisible as they were. He is facing many of them for the first time.

You should both become equally aware, and consciously and alertly aware, of the beneficial ideas and their importance in your lives — and this will be a portion of the book for others also.

I saw to it that he became aware that I was working on our book (this morning). Ideas about it came into his consciousness. In the past, he did not believe that such bleed-throughs should occur, and so in his experience they did not usually emerge. They were there but his belief prevented his recognition of them.

I will from time to time give subsidiary material for Ruburt and also for you, implementing a chapter in the book for your personal use. It is vital that you realize you are working with beliefs in your mind — that the real work is done there in the mind — and not look for immediate physical results.

They will follow as surely and certainly as the “bad” results followed, and this must be a belief: that the good results will come. But the real work is done in the mind. If you do the work then you can rest assured of the results, but you must not check constantly for them. Do you see the difference?

Few beliefs are intellectual alone. When you are examining the contents of your conscious mind, you must learn, or recognize, the emotional and imaginative connotations that are connected with a given idea. There are various ways of altering the belief by substituting its opposite. One particular method is three-pronged. You generate the emotion opposite the one that arises from the belief you want to change, and you turn your imagination in the opposite direction from the one dictated by the belief. At the same time you consciously assure yourself that the unsatisfactory belief is an idea about reality and not an aspect of reality itself.

(Pause at 11:23.) Quite deliberately you use your conscious mind playfully, creating a game as children do, in which for a time you completely ignore what seems to be in physical terms and “pretend” that what you really want is real.