“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will then resume dictation. (Pause.) Your beliefs generate emotion. It is somewhat fashionable to place feelings above conscious thoughts, the idea being that emotions are more basic and natural than conscious reasoning is. The two actually go together but your conscious thinking largely determines your emotions, and not the other way around. Your beliefs generate the appropriate emotion that is implied. A long period of inner depression does not just come upon you. Your emotions do not betray you. Instead, over a period of time you have been consciously entertaining negative beliefs that then generated the strong feelings of despondency.

If emotion could be trusted above conscious reasoning then there would be little point in aware thought at all. You would not need it.

You are not at the mercy of your emotions, either, for they are meant to follow the flow of your reasoning. Your mind is meant to perceive the physical environment clearly, and its judgments about the environment then activate the body’s mechanisms to bring about proper response. If your beliefs about existence are fearful, then the emotional reactions will be those leading to stress. Your own value judgments need examination in such a case.

Later we will have some comments regarding hypnotism. Here let me mention that in those terms you hypnotize yourself constantly with your own conscious thoughts and suggestions. The term hypnosis merely applies to a quite normal state in which you concentrate your attention, narrowing your focus to a particular area of thought or belief.

You concentrate with great vigor upon one idea, usually to the exclusion of others. It is a quite conscious performance. As such it also portrays the importance of belief, for using hypnosis you “force-feed” a belief to yourself, or one given to you by another — a “hypnotist”; but you concentrate all of your attention upon the idea presented.

The mind does not hold just active beliefs. It contains many others in a passive state. These lie latent, ready to be focused upon and used; any of them can be brought to the fore when a conscious thought acts as a stimulus.

If you are focusing upon ideas of poverty, illness or lack, for example, your conscious mind also holds latently concepts of health, vigor and abundance. If you divert your thoughts from the negative ideas to the positive ones, then your concentration will begin to alter the balance. The vast reservoir of energy and potential within you is called into action under the leadership of your conscious mind.

Because you are reasoning as creatures, because you have available such varieties of experience, the [human] species developed reasoning abilities that are meant to evolve and grow as they are used. Your consciousness expands as you use it. You become “more” conscious as you exercise these faculties.

A flower cannot write a poem about itself. You can, and in so doing your own consciousness turns around about itself. It literally becomes more than it was. Existing in such diversified, rich environment-possibilities, the human psyche needed and developed a conscious mind that could make fairly concise and accurate “minute by minute” judgments and evaluations. As the conscious mind grew, now, so did the range of imagination. The conscious mind is a vehicle for the imagination in many ways. The greater its knowledge the further the reach of imagination. In return imagination enriches conscious reasoning and emotional experience.

(Slowly:) You have not learned to use your consciousness properly or fully, so that it seems that imagination, emotions and reasoning are separate faculties, or sometimes set against each other. The mature conscious mind, once more, accepts data from the exterior world and from the interior one. It is only when you believe that consciousness must be attuned only to exterior conditions that you force it to cut itself off from inner knowledge, intuitional “voices,” and the depths from which it springs.