“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:46.) Largely, but not completely, your imagination follows your beliefs, as do your emotions. To some extent there are certain general patterns. A child will cry when it is hurt. It will stop when the hurt stops, and the emotion behind the cry will automatically change into another. But if the child discovers that a prolonged cry after the event gets extra attention and consideration, then it will begin to extend the emotion.

Dictation. (Pause.) Your beliefs always change to some extent. As an adult you perform many activities that you believed you could not as a child. For instance: You may at [the age of] three have believed it was dangerous to cross a street. By thirty, hopefully, you have dismissed such a belief, though it fit in very well and was necessary to you in your childhood. If your mother reinforced this belief telepathically and verbally through dire pictures of the potential danger involved in street crossing, however, then you would also carry within you that emotional fear, and perhaps entertain imaginative considerations of possible accident.

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.

As it took a while for the unsatisfactory beliefs to become materialized, so it may be a time before you see physical results; but the new ideas will take growth and change your experience as certainly as the old ones did. The process of imagining will also bring you face to face with other subsidiary ideas that may momentarily bring you up short. You may see where you held two quite conflicting ideas simultaneously, and with equal vigor. In such a case, you stalemated yourself.