“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

HEALTH, GOOD AND BAD THOUGHTS, AND THE BIRTH OF “DEMONS”

Your thoughts will activate the appropriate feelings. Beneath your awareness, however, they will also trigger the cells’ ever-present memory imprints of stimuli received when those events occurred. There is, to some extent now, a cellular memory playback — and on the part of the entire body, the recognition of its state at that time.

If you pursue such sorrowful thoughts persistently you are reactivating that body condition. Think of one of the most pleasant events that ever happened to you and the reverse will be true, but the process is the same. This time the associated memories are pleasant, and the body changes accordingly.

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.

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 let us return to Augustus; for here we find again in one individual an excellent example of the way in which seemingly nonphysical thoughts and beliefs can affect and alter the corporeal image. And you may take a break.

(I asked about the title for Chapter Eight. Jane thought it had come through; although she had glimmerings of it now, she couldn’t get it clearly. The sirens continued, reminding me of animals prowling about in the distance. As we listened to them I picked up a book which an ESP class member had left behind last night. It was about philosophy and religion in India. “Oh, put it down,” Jane said as I began to leaf through it. “This is one of those times when Seth could give a whole bunch of stuff on that book” — meaning, of course, that now she had more than one channel available.

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 his normal state he accepted only the beliefs he considered were expected of him. As mentioned (in the 628th session in Chapter Six), there was a time before his condition developed when his “good-self thoughts” and his “bad-self thoughts” vied for his attention, and the body tried desperately to react to constant, alternating and often contradictory concepts.

(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.

He became afraid that the body would go out of control and commit violent action, because he was of course aware of the strength of the denied thoughts and feelings. When a crisis situation arose or when he became lost in despair, an acceleration began that he pretended not to notice, and Augustus Two would appear.

(10:35.) Augustus Two was filled with a sense of power — because Augustus considered power wrong and set it aside from what he thought of as his normal self. Yet Augustus knew the body needed the vitality that he had denied it. Therefore enter Augustus Two with his great ideas of extraordinary power, vigor and superiority — (louder and smiling:) I am keeping my Augustuses straight. I hope you are too.

In Augustus Two, the tension found release and the energy flow became more even after initial bursts of activity. The longer Augustus Two stayed, however, the weaker his position became — a fact recognized by Augustus and Augustus Two. Augustus, you see, had to build up sufficient repressed thought and emotion because of a situation with which he could not cope. This threat would then bring about the emergence of Augustus Two. The body behaves as you think it must behave, so Augustus and Augustus Two, with their alternating patterns of behavior, caused the body to react in quite different ways.

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.

The chapter is to be called, “Health, Good and Bad Thoughts, and the Birth of ‘Demons.’ ” And you may take your break.

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.

Your thoughts are. You may approve or disapprove of them, in the way that you think of a storm, for example. Left alone, your thoughts are as various, magnificent, trivial, frightening, or glorious as a hurricane, a flower, a flood, a toad, a raindrop or the fog. Your thoughts are perfectly themselves. Left alone, they come and go.

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.

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.

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.

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.