“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your systems of belief will of course attract certain kinds of thoughts, with their trails of emotional experience. A steady barrage of hateful, revengeful thoughts should actually lead you to look for the beliefs from which they are gaining their strength.

By going along with feelings you unify your emotional, mental and bodily state. When you try to fight or deny them, you divorce yourself from the reality of your being. Dealing with thoughts and feelings as just directed at least roots you firmly in the integrity of your present experience, and allows its innate motion and natural creativity to thrust toward a therapeutic solution.

When you refute such emotions or become terrified of them, you impede the flow of feeling from one moment to the other. You set up dams. Any emotion will change into another if you experience it honestly. Otherwise you clog the natural movement of your entire system.

(9:34.) If you habitually deny the expression of any emotions, to that degree you become alienated not only from your body but from your conscious ideas. You will bury certain thoughts and put up biological armor to prevent you from physically feeling their effects upon your body. In each case the answer lies in your personal system of beliefs, in those strong concepts you hold on an intimate level that brought about the inhibitions to begin with.

As in the material that Ruburt received ahead of time for his own use, natural aggression is cleansing and highly creative — the thrust behind all emotions.

There are two ways to get at your own conscious beliefs. The most direct is to have a series of talks with yourself. Write down your beliefs in a variety of areas, and you will find that you believe different things at different times. Often there will be contradictions readily apparent. These represent opposing beliefs that regulate your emotions, your bodily condition and your physical experience. Examine the conflicts. Invisible beliefs will appear that unite those seemingly diverse attitudes. Invisible beliefs are simply those of which you are fully aware but prefer to ignore, because they represent areas of strife which you have not been willing to handle thus far. They are quite available once you are determined to examine the complete contents of your conscious mind.

If this strikes you as too intellectual a method, then you can also work backward from your emotions to your beliefs. In any case, regardless of which method you choose, one will lead you to the other. Both approaches require honesty with yourself, and a firm encounter with the mental, psychic and emotional aspects of your current reality.

(10:12.) As with Andrea (see the last session), you must accept the validity of your feelings while realizing that they are about certain issues or conditions, and are not necessarily factual statements of your reality. “I feel that I am a poor mother,” or, “I feel that I am a failure.” These are emotional statements and should be accepted as such. You are to understand, however, that while the feelings have their own integrity as emotions, they may not be statements of fact. You might be an excellent mother while feeling that you are very inadequate. You may be most successful in reaching your goals while still thinking yourself a failure.

By recognizing these differences and honestly following the feelings through — in other words, by riding the emotions — you will be led to the beliefs behind them. A series of self-revelations will inevitably result, each leading you to further creative psychological activity. At each stage you will be closer to the reality of your experience than you have ever been.

The conscious mind will benefit greatly as it becomes more and more aware of its directing influence upon events. It will no longer fear the emotions, or the body, as threatening or unpredictable, but sense the greater unity in which it is involved.

The emotions will not feel like stepchildren, with only the best-dressed being admitted. They will not need to cry out for expression, for they will be fully admitted as members of the family of the self. Now, again, some of you will say that your trouble is that you are too emotional, too sensitive. You may believe that you are too easily swayed. In such cases you are afraid of your emotions. You think their powers so strong that all reason can be drowned within them.

(10:27.) No matter how open it may seem that you are, you will nevertheless accept certain emotions that you think of as safe, and ignore others, or stop them at particular points, because you are afraid of following them further. (Pause.) This behavior will follow your beliefs, of course. (Long pause.) If you are over forty, for instance, you may tell yourself that age is meaningless, that you enjoy much younger people, that you think young thoughts. You will accept only those emotions that appear to be in keeping with your ideas of youth. You become concerned with the problems of the young. You accept what you think of as optimistic health-giving thoughts. You consider yourself quite emotional, perhaps.

If you desperately try to remain young, it is usually to hide your own beliefs about age, and to negate all of those emotions connected with it. (Pause.) Whenever you refuse to accept the reality of your creaturehood, you also reject aspects of your spirit. The body exists in the world of space and time. The experiences you may encounter in your sixties are as necessary as those in your twenties. Your changing image is supposed to tell you something. When you pretend alterations do not occur you block both biological and spiritual messages.

Each individual must examine his or her individual beliefs, or begin with feelings which will inevitably lead to them. In this area, as in all others, those of you who are proficient verbally might use the method of writing. Either write down your beliefs as they come to you, or make lists of your intellectual and emotional assumptions. You may find that they are quite different.

If you have a physical symptom, do not run away from it. Feel its reality in your body. Let the emotions follow freely. These will lead you, if you allow them to flow, to the beliefs that cause the difficulty. They will take you through many aspects of your own reality that you must face and explore. These methods release your withheld natural aggressiveness. You may feel that you are swamped by emotion, but trust it — again, it is the motion of your being, and it arouses your own creativity. Followed, it will seek the answers to your problems.

Ruburt in his Dialogues has an excellent example, in the way in which he allowed his feelings to arise, though he was initially frightened of them. Everyone cannot write poetry, but each person is creative in his or her own way, and can follow the emotions as Ruburt did whether or not a poem results.