“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.

Your imagination of course fires your emotions, and it also follows your beliefs faithfully. As you think so you feel, and not the other way around.

Here, as in normal life, your emotions and actions follow your beliefs. If you believe you are sick then for all intents and purposes you are sick. If you believe that you are healthy then you are healthy. There is much written about the nature of healing, and there will be material in this book dealing with it, but there is also healing-in-reverse, in which case an individual loses a belief in his or her health and accepts instead the idea of personal illness.

(Pause at 10:22.) Here the belief itself will generate the negative emotions that will, indeed, bring about a physical or emotional illness. The imagination will follow, painting dire mental pictures of a particular condition. Before long physical data bears out the negative belief; negative in that it is far less desirable than a concept of health.

One belief, of course, can be dependent upon many others, each generating its own emotion and imaginative reality. The belief in illness itself depends upon a belief in human unworthiness, guilt and imperfection, for example.

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.