“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.

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.

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?

Feelings of violence accumulated early, but in his family there were no acceptable ways of releasing normal aggressive feelings. When these built up into felt, violent eruptions, Augustus was only the more convinced of his unacceptable nature. For some time in his normal state as a teenager, he tried harder and harder to be “good.” This meant the banishing of thoughts or impulses that were sexually inspired along various lines, aggressive, or even just unconventional. Considerable energy was used to inhibit these portions of his inner experience. The denied mental events did not disappear, however. They increased in intensity and were kept apart from his “safer” usual thoughts.

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.

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.

Some people are afraid of snakes, even of the most harmless variety, and blind to their beauty and place in the universe. Some are afraid of certain thoughts, and so are oblivious to their beauty and their place in mental life.