“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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 beliefs that you receive, therefore, are your parents’ conceptions of the nature of reality. They are given to you through example, verbal communication, and constant telepathic reinforcement. You receive ideas about the world in general and your relationship to it; and from your parents you are also given concepts of what you are. You pick up their ideas of your own reality.

Underneath all of this, you carry indelibly within you your own knowledge of your identity, meaning and purpose, but in the early stages of development great care is taken to see that you relate in physical terms. These are directional beliefs that you receive from your parents, orienting you in ways that they feel are safe. Cushioned with these beliefs the child can be safe and satisfy its own curiosity, develop its abilities, and throw its full energy in clearly stated areas of activity.

From the earliest stages the child automatically compares its interpretation of reality with its parents’. Since the parents are bigger and stronger and fulfill so many of its needs, it will attempt to bring its experience into line with their expectations and beliefs. While it is generally quite natural for the child to cry or feel “badly” when hurt, this inclination can be carried through belief to such an extent that prolonged feelings of desolation are adopted as definite behavior patterns.

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.

Hinged to this is the belief that this felt lack of communication is wrong, and that for anything wrong you should be punished. In taking dictation for this book you are helping us communicate with many people, while at the same time you feel that you cannot communicate with your own parent.

These beliefs working together, then, bring about a strain in the hand that does the writing. Quite simply, you want to express through the sessions these ideas in which you so believe, and yet you feel or believe yourself guilty for doing so when you cannot describe the same ideas to your own parent.

(10:35.) The idea of punishment, the belief in it, also enters in. You do what you decided to do anyway — have the session — but by punishing yourself with your own personal interpretation.

Tonight Ruburt was exhausted, in one way, from comparing your joint beliefs with those of your brother’s family; of checking his own body beliefs (Jane touched her knee) with theirs and seeing where his were detrimental — but also from contrasting his personal psychic and creative abilities with theirs, and that exhilarated him. The result (smilingly) was that he felt both exhausted and exhilarated.

(10:55. After Jane had come out of another “far-out trance,” as she put it, I was very pleased to tell her that my writing hand was much improved and that Seth had answered her own questions. I went over the delivery with her. Resume at 11:08.)

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.

(The members of Jane’s ESP class have been putting the ideas in Personal Reality to good use. Strangely, this has made Jane somewhat impatient, since she can only proceed with what Seth has given so far. She finds herself in the odd position of envying future readers, who will be able to go through the finished work and make use of it as a unit.