“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The ideas however are tools given to you for your use, in your own way. The more often you use these mental implements, the more proficient you become in developing and fulfilling your own unique gifts. There are those in your world to whom you can turn for help, often — friends, confidants, or doctors, psychologists and psychics. According to “where you are,” any of these persons may be of assistance.

While such help may be welcomed, the kind of value I offer is of a different nature. In larger terms one of my most important messages is simply this: “You are a multidimensional personality, and within you lies all the knowledge about yourself, your challenges and problems, that you will ever need to know. Others can help you in their own way, and at certain levels of development such help is necessary and good. But my mission is to remind you of the incredible power within your own being, and to encourage you to recognize and use it.”

To this end, through Ruburt, I am producing the continuing body of the Seth material, and books, each in a different way geared to these goals. In my present book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, I am including techniques that will allow you and thousands of others to use these ideas in normal daily living, to enrich the life that you know and to help you understand and solve your problems.

While it may not seem so at the present, the greatest gift I can give you is to reaffirm the integrity of your own being. I say this also because I am aware of your present status even as other portions of your own entity are.

Ruburt has only so much time available, and much must be taken into consideration. I am personally aware of your letter. Ruburt cannot answer all mail personally, however, or his work and mine could suffer. I am composing this note therefore to let you know that I hold you in my mind, and that energy is automatically sent out to you when your letter is received, and when this reply is sent. The energy will help release your own understanding and healing abilities, or help you in whatever particular area help is required.

Such energy is always available, whether you write to me or not. Such energy is constantly at your own command. If you believe me, then you will realize that others at best can only act as intermediaries, middlemen, and are in that respect not needed, for the energy is always available in your life. I simply give you that which is your own.

As living cells have a structure, react to stimuli and organize according to their own classification, so do thoughts. Thoughts thrive on association. They magnetically attract others like themselves, and like some strange microscopic animals they repel their “enemies,” or other thoughts that are threatening to their own survival.

Now: First of all, Augustus had been told in various ways, quote: “You think too much. You should be doing something physical, involved in sports, more outgoing.” Such repeated remarks, with other childhood conditions, made him afraid of his own mental activity. He also felt unworthy, so how could his thoughts be good?

In such a way, Augustus actually created a mental structure whose organization followed the principles I mentioned before your break. Under other circumstances and possessing different characteristics, another individual could damage a physical organ by literally attacking it, as surely as it might be assaulted by a virus (emphatically). Because of Augustus’s particular temperament and nature, however, and his native though conventionally undeveloped creativity, he formed a structure rather than destroying one.

(Pause.) What developed was a situation in which the conflicting sets of thoughts and feelings finally took turns, though Augustus maintained his own integrity for most of the time. But those beliefs that he shoved away were, by attraction, instantly seized by the other mental structure — again, composed of ideas and feelings combined into what you might think of as an invisible cellular organization, with all capabilities of reaction.

In his normal condition Augustus thought of his own powerlessness — for he had denied himself normal aggressive action — and felt this weak. The beliefs activated the body’s cellular memory, weakening the body and impeding its function. Yet for a time, while performance was dulled it was steady. A balance was maintained that suited his purposes.

Forget now that in this case such a division occurred, and imagine instead the successive thoughts and feelings that you possess. When you feel weak you are weak. When you feel joyful your body benefits and becomes stronger. Augustus’s case simply shows in exaggerated form the effects of your beliefs upon your physical image. If you think, “Aha, then from now on I will only think good thoughts — and therefore be healthy, and inhibit my ‘bad’ thoughts, or do anything at all with them but think them,” then in your own way you are doing what Augustus did. He began by believing that some of his thoughts were so evil that they must somehow be made nonexistent. So inhibiting what you consider as negative thoughts, or assuming that they are so terrible, is no answer.

Now: Your beliefs about what is desirable and what is not, what is good and what is evil, cannot be divorced from the condition of your body. Your own ideas of values can help you achieve good health or bring about disease, can bring into your experience success or failure, happiness or sadness. Yet each of you will interpret that last remark in line with your own value system. You will have definite ideas about what success or failure means, or what good or evil is.

Your own value system then is built up of your beliefs about reality, and those beliefs form your experience. Suppose you believe that to be “good” you must try to be perfect. You may have been told, or read, that the spirit is perfect, and hence thought that your duty was to reproduce that perfect spirit in flesh as best you could. To this end you attempt to deny all imperfect thoughts and emotions. Your own “negative” thoughts appall you. You may believe also what I have told you — that your thoughts create your reality — so you become all the more frightened at mental or actual expressions of an aggressive nature. You may be so concerned about hurting someone else that you hardly dare move. Trying to be perfect all the time can be far more than a nuisance: It can be disastrous because of your misunderstanding.

The spirit is always in a state of becoming, ever-changing, supple, and in your terms without end, as it was and is without a point of beginning. Ruburt said recently that if he was sure of one thing about physical reality, it was [that is was] not anywhere near perfect in these terms. But in the same meaning of the word neither is the spirit, which to fulfill the requirement of perfection would have to be set in some state of completion beyond which no fulfillment or creativity was possible.

Because you accept the rain as a present reality does not mean, either, that you must believe that all days are stormy, and make that obvious misconception a part of your beliefs about reality. So you do not have to pretend that a “dark” thought doesn’t exist. You do not have to take it as fact that all of your thoughts would be murky, left alone, and try to hide them.

Since you have all kinds of thoughts there are reasons for having them, as you have all kinds of geography. Within your reality it is as foolish to deny the existence of certain thoughts as it would be, say, to pretend that deserts do not exist. In following such a course you deny dimensions of experience and diminish your reality. This does not mean that you have to collect what you think of as negative thoughts, any more than it means that you should spend a month in a desert if you do not like them. Period. It does mean that within nature as you understand it, nothing is meaningless or to be pretended out of existence.

(11:44 p.m. Only our own weariness prompted me to end the session; I could tell that Seth was capable of continuing indefinitely. It had been a long day for us. Now even the sirens had fallen silent.

(Seth’s joking remarks about “the book” refer to this one. In some recent deleted material he had discussed Jane’s initial uncertainty about signing a contract for the publication of psychic work before it had been produced. Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, has read the first six chapters of Personal Reality [as we call it], and has written her a very encouraging letter.)