“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(9:34.) Now if you read a book in your situation that instructs you to contemplate goodness, to turn your thoughts immediately to love and light when you feel irritated, you are in for trouble. Such practices will only serve to make you more frightened of your natural emotions. You will not understand why you have them any better than you did before. You may only hide them more cleverly, and perhaps become ill if, given the situation, you are not already.

When you feel the rise of unpleasant emotions, take a moment and make an effort to identify their source. The answers are far more available than you may have previously believed. Accept such feelings as your own in the moment. Do not shove them underneath, ignore them or try to substitute what you think of as good thoughts.

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.

There are many biological signs shown by the body, all meant as communications to others on a creative basis — as warnings to whatever degree. Each is automatic in its own way, and yet ritualistic, a dance of muscle in motion with its own meaning, and biologically understood. These are all constructive. They are meant to elicit reactions from others and to arrive at new points of understanding, a balance of rights. When your conscious thoughts interfere with such processes, you are in deep trouble.

(11:25.) When you try to be spiritual by cutting off your creaturehood you become less than joyful, fulfilled, satisfied natural creatures, and fall far short of understanding true spirituality. Many who say they believe in the power of thought are so afraid of it that they inhibit it in themselves, avoiding any that appear negative or harmful. The slightest “aggressive” expression is blocked. Thoughts can kill, these people think — as if the individual against whom such an impulse was directed had no protective life-giving energies of his or her own, and no natural defense.

Here, often, and for various reasons, you find a hidden and distorted sense of power that says, “I am so powerful that I could kill you with my thought, and yet I refuse to do so.” No one, and no one thought, is that powerful. If thoughts alone could kill, you would not have the overpopulation problem!

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.

(Lately I’ve been asking Jane if she thought Seth would give at least a short dissertation on probabilities for this book. I’ve been especially curious about this since we received his information on the death of our cat, Rooney, in the 639th session. [A note added later: Seth kept his word. See Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen.]