“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE BODY OF YOUR BELIEFS, AND THE POWER STRUCTURES OF BELIEFS

Dictation: Chapter Six: “The Body of Your Beliefs, and the Power Structures of Beliefs.” This is the heading.

Quite literally, you live in the body of your beliefs. You perceive through the body of your beliefs. Your beliefs can increase your vision or diminish it. They can increase or diminish your hearing, or any sense function.

Functions in this particular regard are habits. You simply forget how to hear properly, following your belief. All of the minute manipulations necessary to hearing are unconsciously repressed. The actual physical deterioration then does indeed follow. The deterioration however does not occur first, but after.

The same kind of development can occur in almost any physical category. Usually more than one belief is involved. Parallel with the belief that vision will fail, you may have the before-mentioned belief that hearing will dim, and these two ideas may be reinforced by a belief that age automatically makes you less a person, turning you into an individual who can no longer relate in the daily pattern of environment. The belief, you see, would work to insure the materialization of that state. (Pause.) On the other hand you may believe that wisdom grows with age, that self-understanding brings a peace of mind not earlier known, that the keen mind is actually far better able to assess the environment, and that the physical senses are much more appreciative of all stimuli. And so those conditions will be physically met in your experience. The physical apparatus itself, following your beliefs, will continue in health.

Your effective power of action follows the lines of your beliefs. To believe in your own weakness is to deny yourself the power of action. To accept uncritically all beliefs that come to you is to open yourself to a barrage of conflicting data at best, in which the clear lines of action and power become blurred. Contradictory demands and assessments are then sent in to the inner self, which by various methods will try to tell you that something is wrong. Beliefs of like nature attract each other, for you are bound to look for consistencies in your behavior and experience.

(Pause.) You must learn to deal with your own beliefs directly or you will be forced to deal with them indirectly — by reacting to them quite without knowing it in your physical experience. When you rail against an unfavorable environment, or a situation or condition, basically — and underline the following phrase — you are not acting independently, but almost blindly reacting. You are reacting to events that seem to happen to you, and always in response to a situation.

This is done by combining belief, emotion and imagination, and forming them into a mental picture of the desired physical result. Of course, the wanted result is not yet physical or you would not need to create it, so it does no good to say that your physical experience seems to contradict what you are trying to do.

(Pause.) Because ideas and beliefs have this electromagnetic reality, then, constant interplay between those strongly contradictory beliefs can cause great power blocks, impeding the flow of inner energy outward. At times a polarization can occur. Unassimilated beliefs, unexamined ideas, can seem to adopt a life of their own. These can effectively dominate certain areas of activity.

Now, dictation: Not long ago Ruburt was presented with a demonstration embodying the nature and power of beliefs.

He was a study, a living example, of the effects of conflicting unexamined beliefs, a fierce and yet agonized personification of what can happen when an individual allows his conscious mind to deny its responsibilities — i.e., when an individual becomes afraid of his own consciousness.

Here was a young man whose beliefs were alive with their own life while he was relatively powerless. No effort had been made to reconcile directly opposing beliefs, until the personality itself was quite literally polarized.

(10:20.) You were faced with what could be called a classic instance of secondary personality. I am discussing it here because it so beautifully illustrates the nature and power of beliefs, and the conflicts that can arise when an individual does not accept responsibility for his own thoughts. This is not a usual case — but to some extent or another, such a division occurs physically or mentally when the contents of the conscious mind are not examined.