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THE CONSCIOUS MIND AS THE CARRIER OF BELIEFS. YOUR BELIEFS IN RELATION TO HEALTH AND SATISFACTION

Now: The next chapter, Eleven, to be titled: “The Conscious Mind as the Carrier of Beliefs. Your Beliefs in Relation to Health and Satisfaction.” That is the heading.

(9:12. Pause.) The nature of your personal beliefs in a large measure directs the kinds of emotions you will have at any given time. You will feel aggressive, happy, despairing, or determined according to events that happen to you, your beliefs about yourself in relation to them, and your ideas of who and what you are. You will not understand your emotions unless you know your beliefs. It will seem to you that you feel aggressive or upset without reason, or that your feelings sweep down upon you without cause if you do not learn to listen to the beliefs within your own conscious mind, for they generate their own emotions.

One of the strongest general causes of depression, for example, is the belief that your conscious mind is powerless either in the face of exterior circumstances thrust upon you from without, or before strong emotional events that seem to be overwhelming from within.

Psychology, religion, science — in one way or another, all of these have added to the confusion by stripping the conscious mind of its directing qualities, and viewing it as a stepchild of the self. (Pause.) The schools of “positive thinking” try to remedy the situation, but often do more harm than good because they attempt to force beliefs upon you that you would like to hold, but do not in your present state of confusion.

Many such philosophies make you cower at the idea of entertaining “negative” thoughts or emotions. In all cases the clues to your emotional experience and behavior lie in your systems of belief: some more evident to you than others, but all available to you consciously. If you believe that you are of little merit, inferior and filled with guilt, then you may react in several ways according to your personal background and the framework in which you accepted those beliefs. You may be terrified of aggressive feelings because [it seems] others so much more powerful than you could retaliate. If you believe that all such thoughts are wrong you will inhibit them and feel all the more guilty — which will generate aggressiveness against yourself and further deepen your sense of unworthiness.

First be aware of the reality of your feelings. As you become more aware of your beliefs over a period of time, you will see how they bring forth certain feelings automatically. A man who is sure of himself is not angry at every slight done him, nor does he carry grudges. A man who fears for his own worth, however, is furious under such conditions. The free flow of your emotions will always lead you back to your conscious beliefs if you do not impede them.

(Pause.) No one can do this for you. You may believe that good mental health means being always cheerful, resolute and kind, and never crying or showing disappointment. That belief alone can lead you to deny quite natural dimensions of human experience, and to impede the flow of emotions that could otherwise cleanse both your body and your mind. If you are convinced that feelings are dangerous, then again that belief itself will generate a fear of all of them, and you may become almost panic-stricken if you display anything but the most “reasonable” calm behavior.

Your emotions then may strike you as highly unpredictable, extremely powerful, and to be kept down at all costs. Such an attempt to strangle natural feeling is bound to take its toll, but it is the belief itself that is to blame, and not the emotions. Any of the conditions mentioned puts you out of touch with your inner sense of balance. The natural grace of your being becomes disturbed.

The conscious mind is meant to align all of your capabilities in accordance with its beliefs about the nature of reality. Those resources are considerable, for they include the deepest aspects of your creativity, and powers far beneath consciousness of which you are only dimly aware.

You cannot will yourself to be happy while believing that you have no right to happiness, or that you are unworthy of it. You cannot tell yourself to release aggressive thoughts if you think it is wrong to free them, so you must come to grips with your beliefs in all instances.

If it seems to you that the soul is degraded by its alliance with the flesh then you will not be able to enjoy your own sense of grace, for you will not consider it possible. Your beliefs will dictate your very interpretation of various kinds of emotions. Many people, for example, are convinced that anger is always negative. It can be the most arousing and therapeutic emotion under certain circumstances. You can then realize that you have cowered before contradictory beliefs for years, rise up in anger against them, and quite literally begin a new life of freedom. Normal aggressiveness is basically a natural kind of communication, particularly in social orders; a way of letting another person know that in your terms they have transgressed, and therefore a method of preventing violence — not of causing it.

To a large extent, a highly involved series of symbolic actions are carried out long before any battle takes place, if it does finally. The display of the aggressive behavior, however, far more frequently prevents an actual combat situation. Man has highly charged contradictory attitudes about aggression, and his beliefs about it cause many of his mass and private problems.

Each person has his own built-in energy and protection. You accept only those ideas and thoughts that fit in with your own system of beliefs, and even then there are various safeguards. No man dies unless he wants to die, and for a much better reason than that you may want him to.

(Now Seth made some suggestions about how the members of ESP class could, by following the data in this session, write down their individual beliefs for group discussion.)

(11:40 p.m. Jane yawned again and again. “I feel exhausted — and yet I’m charged with energy at the same time,” she said. The paper Seth had referred to concerned some of her own work with beliefs. My writing hand ached.)