“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

(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.

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.

(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.)