“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.

(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.

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.

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.

AFFIRMATION, THE PRACTICAL BETTERMENT OF YOUR LIFE, AND THE NEW STRUCTURING OF BELIEFS

(At once at 12:25.) New chapter heading [Twenty-two:] “Affirmation, the Practical Betterment of Your Life, and the New Structuring of Beliefs.”