“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Remember, these mental associations are living things. They are formations of energy assembled into invisible structures, through processes quite as valid and complicated as the organization of any group of cells. Comparing them with cells, they are of briefer duration, generally speaking, though under certain conditions this does not apply. But your thoughts form structures as real as the cells. Their composition is different in that no solidity is involved in your terms.

Using this analogy, your mental and emotional life forms a framework composed of such structures, and these act directly upon the cells of your physical body.

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.

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.

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.

You with your conscious mind are to discriminate among those thoughts as to which ones you want to form into your system of beliefs (intently), but in so doing you are not to pretend blindness. You may at times wish that a rainy day were a sunny one, but you do not stand at the window and deny that the rain is falling, or that the air is cold and the sky dark.