“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. If you paint a picture, its overall quality comes from the inner atmosphere of your being.

In the same manner, you create your physical image and your world. If anything in that physical image or world needs changing, the change must first be made in the atmosphere of the inner self.

For this projection of inner into outer is automatic. Understanding the processes involved is of great benefit. The physical self seems (underlined) to react to physical stimuli. Actually, of course, it is reacting to its own reality, projected outward.

The objects in the physical universe are but symbols to express other realities existing within private realms. The inner will always be projected outward within your system. If, for example, a letter comes to you bearing good news, and you react to the letter with high spirits, then you should understand that the high spirits existed first, and created the materialization of the letter within the physical systems, through the multilayered and complicated reactions that bind together the physical system.

The intensity of the inner feeling is the dominating factor here. A sudden but intense feeling of hatred or resentment or fear may cause tragic physical circumstances, for example. A sudden and intense exaltation, however, will have the same immediate and literally astounding but opposite physical effect. That is, pure joy, even of brief duration, can literally change the direction of a life.

Between these extremes lie all the other colors and hues of inner feeling. A variety of poor or negative feelings, however, of fairly low intensity, can add up to a general negative emotional climate, which projects itself outward into physical reality.

These negative feelings will be translated in physical terms. It does you little good to know that physical symptoms or inadequate physical surroundings are symbolic unless you realize that the inner situation can be changed.

Now it appears to you that a difference is worked when you exchange a poor physical symbol for a constructive one. The change of course comes before this in the inner self. The physical being simply uses the physical system as a checking board.