“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) There has been on the one hand a too-great reliance upon the conscious mind — while its characteristics and mechanisms were misunderstood — so that proponents of the “conscious-reasoning-mind-above-all” theories advocate a use of intellect and reasoning powers, while not recognizing their source in the inner self.

The “unconscious” simply contains great portions of your own experience in which you have been taught not to believe. Again, your conscious mind is meant to look into the exterior world and into the interior one. The conscious mind is a vehicle for the expression of the soul in corporeal terms.

(A one-minute pause at 9:59.) It is your method of assessing temporal experience according to the beliefs that it holds about the nature of reality. It automatically causes the body to react in certain ways. I cannot say this often enough: Your beliefs form your reality, your body and its condition, your personal relationships, your environment, and en masse your civilization and world.

If — now, a brief innocuous-enough example — you meet an individual often enough and think, “He gives me a pain in the neck,” it is surely no coincidence that you find yourself with a painful neck in future encounters with this person. The suggestion is quite a conscious one, however (emphatically), given by yourself and carried out not symbolically but most practically, most literally. In other words, the conscious mind gives its orders and the inner self carries them out.

In this existence you are physically oriented. Surely then the conscious physically oriented mind is the one that is meant to make deductions about the nature of physical reality. Otherwise you would have no free will.

(10:29. Jane had been very well dissociated, with her delivery intense and often fast. She shook her head as she came out of trance. “Wow, was he ever going strong. Boy … I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to talk about tonight, but then I saw that he had one whole block of stuff to get through before he gave us any break….”

There have been tyrannies propagated for various reasons by the race of man upon itself. One of the greatest, however, is the idea that the conscious mind does not have any touch with the fountains of its own being, that it is divorced from nature, and that the individual is therefore at the mercy of unconscious drives over which he has no control.

You are not to hammer at yourself consciously. Imagination and emotion are your great allies. Your conscious direction will automatically bring them into play. You can see why it is so important that you examine all of your beliefs about yourself and the nature of your reality; and one belief, if you let it, will lead you to another.

But pretend that you go beyond this point. In sheer desperation you say, “All right, I will examine my beliefs further!” Now this is a hypothetical case so you may find one of innumerable beliefs. You may, for instance, find that you believe you are not worthy, and hence should not look attractive. Or that health means physical weight and it is dangerous to be slim.

You may find yourself thinking, “I am no one to begin with,” or “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” or, “The world is against me,” or, “Money is wrong. People who have it are not spiritual.” You may discover, again, one of numerous beliefs that all lead to the fact that you do not want to have money or are afraid of it. In any case your imagination and your beliefs go hand in hand.

Yet if you examine your beliefs more carefully you will find one of many possible beliefs, such as, “I’m afraid to remember my dreams,” or, “My dreams are always unpleasant,” or, “I’m afraid to know what I dream about,” or, “I want to remember my dreams but — they may tell me more than I want to know!”

(A note added later: “I was wrong about this being the title of the next chapter,” Jane wrote in November, “but I know it will be one….” However, not only was the end of this chapter not so imminent; Seth never did use Jane’s suggested chapter heading.)