“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Quietly:) Your attitudes toward sleep, dreams, or any alterations of consciousness are all colored to some extent then by beliefs concerning good and evil in your Western society. These emerge from the old Puritan work ethic: “The devil finds evil work for idle hands.”

The dreamer, whatever his age, job or family background, is considered most suspect, for it seems that he doesn’t even have a craft to excuse his moral laziness. People with such beliefs will find it most difficult to understand the creativity of their own being. The work done in dreams, the multitudinous experience encountered there, will be invisible to them. They will have little regard or respect for the dreamers or visionaries of the world, and will be the first to leap upon those in their own generation who display such tendencies.

For all of this, however, inner portions of each individual’s being are not touched by those beliefs. The ideas will be reflected in their daily experience, certainly, and seem to be justified. Yet beneath, the inner self is quite aware of the great thrusting creativity that occurs in dreams, and realizes that the source of individual energy has nothing to do with such superficial concepts as the nature of good and evil.

(A long pause at 10:06.) The brain can be called simply the physical counterpart of the mind. By means of the brain the functions of the soul and intellect are connected with the body. Through the characteristics of the brain, events that are of nonphysical origin become physically valid. There is a definite filtering and focusing effect at work, then. Practically speaking, you do indeed form the appearance that reality takes through your conscious beliefs. Those beliefs are used as screening and directing agents, separating certain nonphysical probable events from others, and bringing them into three-dimensional actuality.

Other probable events could just as well become physically experienced ones. Those beliefs about yourself form your own self-image, and define your concepts of what is possible or not possible for you. You will choose from those nonphysical probable events, therefore, only those you feel you are in accord with.

The physical constitution of the body follows your beliefs, and so all of its sense data will faithfully mirror the beliefs that direct its activity. In certain terms hypnosis is simply an exercise in the alteration of beliefs, and only too clearly shows that sense experience follows expectations.

(Pause at 10:27.) The overall private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your beliefs and therefore your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

On such occasions your beliefs usually lose their edge, the directions you give to your body are not clear, and the world seems fuzzy. This is often a time of deep unconscious activity, when new latent probable characteristics are biding their time, so to speak, waiting for emergence.

In your terms probable events are brought into actuality by utilizing the body’s nerve structure through certain intensities of will or conscious belief.

These beliefs obviously have another reality beside the one with which you are familiar. They attract and bring into being certain events instead of others. Therefore, they determine the entry of experienced events from an endless variety of probable ones. You seem to be at the center of your world, because for you your world begins with that point of intersection where soul and physical consciousness meet.

They represent your experience on other than physical levels. My dear friend Ruburt (briefly louder) has to some extent given an analogy of this in the first Oversoul 7 book, a novel. You perceive a certain event as present. Your beliefs give it entry through the nerve synapses, and attract it. It then seems to become the past. You have only tuned into a portion of it physically, though; that past event continues to exist with its own “future,” which you may or may not perceive, according to which probable action you pull into your next experiences of actuality.

You can dip into cellular memory, for example. Using memory, you follow but one recognized sequence of remembered events backward. There are elements in your past that are as unpredictable, however, as the elements in your future now appear to be (emphatically). There is creativity in your past waiting for you even as there is in your future, but to utilize such experiences you must learn to alter your beliefs, and to some degree escape from the particular kind of limited conscious focus that you habitually use.

In your terms that event may never come to pass, however, because it may be arising from a probable past that was once your present, but from which you have diverged. This is one of the reasons why psychics’ predictions often do not seem to bear out, for at every point you do indeed have the free will, through your beliefs, to alter your experience.

Your beliefs form the pivot of your present experience.