“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(My mother lives with my brother and his family in a small community in upstate New York, near Rochester, and Jane and I had spent the weekend visiting one and all. During our drive back to Elmira this morning Jane said, “Somebody’s working on Seth’s book, I can tell you that. I keep getting snatches of it. It’s about imagination and beliefs, I think, and how they interact — only there’s a lot more to it. Well,” she added, pleased, “it’s nice to know the work’s being done….”)

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.

(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.

(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.

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.

(10:01. Jane said she had been really out during her trance, and that now she felt “almost drunk with exhilaration.” The times noted as she delivered the material show that she’d marched along at a good pace. “On the one hand,” she continued, looking a little bleary, “I could go way under and deliver the book until morning; or I could just go to bed and conk right out.” She was quite curious about the reasons behind these feelings.

This would not be involved particularly were it not for the fact of two subsidiary current beliefs that conflict, having to do with the weekend. One, that you should be in Rochester, as you were, dealing vocally with your mother. And two, that you should have been here, reaching out to the world at large through your painting.

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.

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.