“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment, then… Imagination also plays an important part in your subjective life, as it gives mobility to your beliefs. It is one of the motivating agencies that helps transform your beliefs into physical experience. It is vital therefore that you understand the interrelationship between ideas and imagination. In order to dislodge unsuitable beliefs and establish new ones, you must learn to use your imagination to move concepts in and out of your mind. The proper use of imagination can then propel ideas in the directions you desire.

1. In larger terms Seth’s ideas as to what the “whole self” is take in a great deal — with reincarnation and probable personalities, for instance, being only two of the concepts involved. The safest thing to say would be that each session, even, adds to our knowledge of what a constantly expanding whole self can be. See both The Seth Material and Seth Speaks.

These will reinforce the family group when the child most needs protection. This acquiescence to belief, then, is important in the early stages as infant develops into child. This sharing of mutual ideas not only protects the new offspring from dangers obvious to the parents; it also serves as a framework within which the child can grow.

(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.

You do not have to carry such a belief. I am well aware that strong elements of your civilization are built upon ideas of guilt and punishment. Many of you are afraid that without a feeling of guilt there would be no inner discipline, and the world would run wild. It is running quite wild now — not despite your ideas of guilt and punishment, but largely because of them. But we will have more to say about that later in the book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You realize that ideas are not stationary. Emotions and imagination move them in one direction or the other, reinforce them or negate them.

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.

You may believe that you have a right to health, and yet with equal intensity believe that the human condition is by nature tainted. So you will try to be healthy and not healthy at the same time, or successful and not successful, according to your individual system of beliefs — for later in the book you will see how your beliefs will generally fall into a system of related ideas.

(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.