“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Affirmation then means the loving acceptance of your own unique individuality. It may involve denial, where you refuse to accept the visions or dogmas of others in order to more clearly perceive and form your own.

Such affirmation will lead you to your own inner discoveries, and attract from the deepest portions of your being the particular kind of information, experience, or perception that you need. The loving acceptance of yourself will allow you to ride through beliefs as you would through the changing characteristics of a countryside. The more a belief encourages you to use your abilities and vitality, then the more affirmative it is.

Ruburt’s perception is highly altered this evening, and this is an example of certain kinds of both affirmation and denial. He has always emphasized his own unique creative and intuitive processes. In so doing, he denied many of the concepts believed in by others. He accepted the belief that any consciousness could be in some kind of direct intimate contact with experiences and realities usually not perceived, but ignored.

The legs run, and leap over areas of ground. They cannot themselves interpret the reality beneath them. The feet are not aware of the ants they crush. They may feel the grass or sidewalk or the road, but the peculiar individual sensate life of the grass itself, or of the ant, escapes the feet, which are involved in their own reality and concerned with these other things only in their relationship to feethood.

The mind can interpret the experiences that the legs and the feet have, however, and by imaginatively using that sensual data can perceive the ant’s reality to some extent. Now when the mind races and runs, it sometimes has great difficulty interpreting its activities to the brain, which is usually concerned with other realities only to the extent that they impinge upon it.

Now: Ruburt’s mind is far more aware of other realities than his brain is, but he consciously believes in the greater reality of himself and his perceptions. The brain also possesses this belief, and so it opens itself as much as possible to the mind’s activities. Because it does, certain intuitive psychic and “intellectually spacious” experiences can be physically felt to some extent. The knowledge is interpreted through alterations in body sensation, which give it an important corporeal validity. In such cases high mental and psychic activity is reflected in the body’s experience, providing a beneficial unity.

(10:45.) A certain kind of affirmation of self allows the brain to tune into these more spacious methods of perception that are the natural characteristics of the mind. There are very good reasons why this type of assertion must first occur. The brain (and the entire physical system) is meant to insure your bodily survival and to follow your conscious beliefs about reality. There is always a harmonious unifying connection between your beliefs and activities. Some people feel utterly confident in certain areas and are timorous in others. Some aspects of life may be ignored or even refuted for a time while others are focused upon. The individual will very cleverly and shrewdly go ahead in those areas in which he or she feels safe, often when in the process of altering beliefs. You will not use your spacious mind until you affirm its reality within yourself, and until you are ready to handle the additional data which will then become consciously available to one extent or another. But the spacious mind operates through your creaturehood; in your terms it represents latent abilities of consciousness that can be more or less normal functions.

There are built-in biological structures that are activated for the reception of such messages, and they have always been a part of your physical nature as a species. They will not be triggered on a personal basis until your own beliefs allow you to perceive the multidimensional layers of your own experience or at least to accept the possibilities.

(11:00.) You do not have to know anything about so-called psychic matters necessarily. Many individuals use the spacious mind and its perceptions, taking it for granted without realizing how different their own perception is from that of others.

An individual can tune into spacious-mind operation two or three times in a lifetime without realizing it, and have experiences that he finds difficult to interpret later. The affirmation involved is one of transcendence, in which for a time a person affirms his reality in flesh and at the same time states his independence from it (smile) — and realizes that both of these conditions exist simultaneously. A dual perception takes place in which the spacious mind is activated. By “activated” I mean that the physical organism is suddenly aware of [the spacious mind’s] existence.

Now the brain would have to sort out this information so that the physically attuned mechanism was clearly able to maintain its temporal present. When man first developed the pause of reflection, as mentioned earlier in this book (see sessions 635–36 in Chapter Nine), he did undergo initial disorientation before he learned to distinguish a vividly remembered event of the past from a presently experienced one. The growing consciousness had to make such distinctions for practical behavior. To utilize future probable events, the physical brain would be forced to enlarge its function while keeping the individual in clear relationship with the present moment of power, or corporeal effectiveness. Affirmation always involves the acknowledgement of your power in the present. In greater terms, denial is the surrendering of that power. Affirmation then is the acquiescence to your ability, as a spirit within flesh, to form the physical reality of your creaturehood.

Suppose you have a particular goal in mind as a youngster, toward which you work. Your intent, images, desires and determination form a psychic force that is projected out ahead of you, so to speak. You send the reality of yourself from your present into what you think of as the future.

(12:21.) In other terms, the self that you have projected into the future is sending you back encouragement from a probable reality that you still can create. That focused self operates from its present, however, and some day in your own future you may find yourself thinking nostalgically of a moment back in your own past, when you were indecisive and irresolute, but took the proper course.

New paragraph: The early affirmation of yourself projected into the future made such an incident possible. In the same way your acceptance of yourself and your own integrity can, at any moment in your present, alter your past and future.

Chapter Twenty-two of Seth Speaks contains additional material on Seth Two. In the 589th session Seth tells us in part: “…there is the same kind of connection between that personality and myself as the one that exists between Ruburt and myself. But in your terms, Seth Two is far further divorced from my reality than I am from Ruburt’s. You can imagine Seth Two as a future portion of me if you prefer, and yet far more is involved.”