“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(9:35.) So it is quite necessary that an acquiescence to belief does exist, particularly in early life. There is no reason, though, for an individual to be bound by childhood beliefs or experience. The nature of some such beliefs is that while seemingly obvious ones are recognized as harmful or foolish, others connected to them may not be so easily understood.

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.

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.

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.