“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Aside from her sympathetic response, Jane found the letter evocative of some of her own psychic experiences, and asked me to put it in our Seth notebook for an answer — we felt that Seth’s reply would be of interest to many. For the same reason, at the end of the session [in Chapter Twelve] we’re including a local resident’s experience with a certain set of beliefs.

Again, while the conscious mind is meant to direct the flow of your experience through your beliefs, and to materialize them, the actual mechanics are taken care of automatically by other portions of the self. You must indeed trust that your new beliefs will work as completely for you as your old ones.

(Long pause.) It may seem that your religious beliefs have little to do with your health or with your day-to-day experience. Those of you who have left organized religions may feel relatively free from what you consider to be the adverse connotations of original sin and the like. Yet no one is free of belief of any kind in that area. Indeed, a belief in atheism is a belief.

(11:45.) These people of course were, and are, quite fallible. When you are a child however adults seem godlike. Their words fall with great weight because you are so at the mercy of their support. As a child it was quite necessary that you accept beliefs from others before your conscious mind could form its own.

You accepted the concepts for your own reasons. Those given beliefs represent the spiritual and mental fabric of ideas — the raw material, so to speak, with which you have to work. In adolescence certain beliefs will be easily and immediately abandoned, or altered to fit the expanding pattern of experience. Still other beliefs will remain, with perhaps certain elements being changed. The beliefs may be revised to fit your new image, for example, while the main pattern remains the same.

As soon as your friend began reading his book on health foods he received, or presented himself with, an excellent example of the way in which beliefs work. If he realizes this now the experience can be invaluable.

The refusal of particular foods, therefore, became a symbol for the avoidance of certain beliefs, so that for a while the beliefs were not faced while the foods were not eaten. This is done with many such methods on a consistent basis by people all the time. In your friend’s case, the realization that he can eat those foods means that he understands that he can encounter those beliefs in himself, as he is now beginning to do.

His rejection of the foods for this length of time persisted as a symbol that he was still not facing his beliefs. With each “triumph,” now — and there have been several with your help and Ruburt’s — he shows himself that beliefs and not food are important, and reinforces his independence and freedom.