“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Remember that ideas are as natural as the weather. They follow patterns, then, and obey certain laws even as more strictly physical phenomena do. Unfortunately, no one examines the nature of mental reality from such a viewpoint. You will be born in the midst of certain mass beliefs, and these may vary according to the country of your nativity. As you come into your body with all of its physical surroundings, so at birth do you emerge into a rich natural psychological environment in which beliefs and ideas are every bit as real.

Such judgments are very simplistic, and ignore the great range of human motivation and experience. If you are bound and determined that “GOD” (in capitals and quotes) creates only “good,” then any physical deficiency, illness or deformity becomes an affront to your belief, threatens it, and makes you angry and resentful. If you become ill you can hate yourself for not being what you think you should be — a perfect physical image made in the likeness of a perfect God.

(9:55.) Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. Under such conditions you can even seek out illness to prove to yourself the strength of your own spirituality — and to impress it upon others. The same kind of moral value judgment can be placed in almost any area of human activity, and will of course have social repercussions. Those reactions will add to the prevailing beliefs and in turn affect the individual.

What sin did the poor person or the sick person commit? That question, often asked unconsciously — if not consciously — brings you back to beliefs in punishment that have nothing to do with the concept of natural guilt, but with those distortions placed upon it. There is also a connection with misinterpretation of the Bible. Christ as you think of him was simply saying that you form your own reality. He tried to rise above the idea-systems of those times, yet even he had to use them, and so the connotations of sin and punishment distorted the message given.

Your daily experience will be affected by your race, your beliefs about it, your beliefs about other races, and the climate of opinion in general. On a quite simple basis, if you consider God in human terms you will project him as belonging to your own race. If you belong to a minority or if you are black, then you may be caught in a conflict of beliefs.

It is impossible to separate your daily experience in any of its aspects from your beliefs and those judgments that you place upon them. The beliefs boil down to your ideas of right and wrong, and they involve all of your attitudes concerning illness and health, wealth and poverty, the relationships of the races, religious conflicts, and more important, your intimate day-by-day psychological reality.