“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I have often stated that the mind-body relationship is one system. The thoughts are as necessary to the whole system as the body’s cells are. Ruburt correctly interpreted an analogy I gave him in which I compared thoughts to individual cells, and belief systems to the physical organs, which are composed of cells. The organs obviously are stationary in the body, though the cells within them die and are reborn.

Belief systems are as necessary and natural as physical organs are. In fact, their purpose is to help you direct the functioning of your biological being. You give no conscious thought to the coming and going of cells within your organs. Left alone, your thoughts will come and go through your belief systems just as naturally; and ideally, they will balance out, maintaining their own health and directing your body so that its innate therapies take place.

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.

You cannot do this by ignoring the validity of the thoughts as your experience, however (very intensely), by trying to shove them under the rug of a superficial optimism. Such habitual, unhappy thoughts will bring about the same kind of physical experience, but it is your own system of beliefs that you must examine.

The “negative” subjective and objective events that you meet are meant to make you examine the contents of your own conscious mind. In their way the hateful or revengeful thoughts are natural therapeutic devices, for if you follow them, accepting them with their own validity as feelings, they will automatically lead you beyond themselves; they will change into other feelings, carrying you from hatred into what may seem to be the quicksands of fear — which is always behind hatred.

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.

Fear, faced and felt with its bodily sensations and the thoughts that go along with it, will automatically bring about its own state of resolution. The conscious system of beliefs behind the impediment will be illuminated, and you will realize that you feel a certain way because you believe an idea that causes and justifies such a reaction.

(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.

If you find yourself running around in a spiritual frenzy, trying to repress every negative idea that comes into your head, then ask yourself why you believe so in the great destructive power of your slightest “negative” thought.

Now: It is true that habitual thoughts of love, optimism and self-acceptance are better for you than their opposites; but again, your beliefs about yourself will automatically attract thoughts that are consistent with your ideas. There is as much natural aggressiveness in love as there is in hate. Hate is a distortion of such a normal force, the result of your beliefs.

(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.

You will inhibit any thoughts of death or dying, or of old age, and so close out quite natural feelings that are meant to lead you beyond your earlier years. You are denying the body’s corporeal existence and its focus in the time of the seasons, and cheating yourself of those natural biological, psychic, and mental motions that are meant to take you past themselves.

(11:17. Jane was very surprised to learn that she’d been in trance for almost half an hour; she thought but a few minutes had passed. Here is part of the passage from her book of poetry referred to by Seth. Jane wrote it five days ago. In this excerpt the Mortal Self tells the Soul: