“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is at first appalling to discover that the negative as well as the positive events are formed at automatic levels, but in response to your expectations and beliefs. World events such as those you read about in your newspaper are the result of conventional ideas and beliefs—those with which you were reared. They will always form part of the fabric of your existence in this life. There are no reasons, however, why they should predominate. They represent a species of consciousness, a classification.

This is simply the result of misunderstanding, confusion, and trying to use a “higher” level of consciousness for goals and beliefs still held at a “lower” level, in quotes now.

I am not, as you should know, saying that the goal of financial success is a low one. Unfortunately, however, the beliefs connected with that goal usually involve whole webworks of beliefs that would automatically prevent high creativity.

You are trying to live your lives, speaking simply now, at two mutually exclusive levels, combining two lines of belief that contradict each other. As a result any one action you take does not satisfy you, for you are equally drawn to the other direction. Events then are not clearcut or satisfying. You cannot thoroughly relax or thoroughly go ahead. You cannot thoroughly enjoy your solitude, or thoroughly appreciate your friends and normal social activities. You see in Ruburt’s physical condition the clearest representation, but this is simply the clearest sign of events that exist in your own private experience also. You go out into the world to do the chores, grudgingly, but you go. Ruburt goes ahead creatively, lately, grudgingly, but he goes.

You are faced of course with conditions built up of long-held attitudes. In general, however, you are tying the highest faculties of your consciousness to goals that are at least unbecoming to them, and because you have still accepted the tenets of conventionalized beliefs. You cannot serve two masters at any one time with hopes of doing justice to either, and you only confuse yourselves. It is the mixture of consciousness with which you form your events that causes the difficulty.

In one area, that of money, Ruburt is fairly free, finally. You consider taxes as a symbol of the creator’s support of the mass world—that is, you feel forced to contribute to a world with which you do not agree. You feel that that world threatens you, and yet you must support it. But the threat—and you must try to understand me—the threat does not exist in that world, but only in your beliefs toward it. You are in that world of threat only according to the degree of power you allow it to have over you.

You have shut off your own psychic experiences, as to some extent Ruburt has, because of the dual purposes mentioned earlier, and the dual sets of beliefs. Some of these beliefs did not confront you earlier, you see, for you were not in a position to confront them.

(Loud and amused:) Your ideas about houses, for example, did not bear fruit until you had one. You did not either, incidentally have to confront your negative beliefs about taxes until you were lucky enough, and creative enough, to find yourself in a position where you need pay a considerable amount. You could have chosen to remain poor, and hence avoid the difficulty.

You have a clash of beliefs, some hangers-on, in other words, but those hangers-on are troublesome, for they are precisely those that prevent you from utilizing techniques with which you are quite familiar, that could vastly enrich your situation.

The whole issue involving shoveling snow or mowing the grass also involves your ideas of time. And conflicts of beliefs, as well as other conventionalized concepts that quite override your natural love of physical bodily activity.

The worries caused by the conventionalized beliefs cut down the quality of your time, so that while you jealously try to preserve your creative hours they become diluted. So that you actually spend “dead” time—that is, periods that are devoid of creativity while supposedly devoted to it. The chest trouble is a result of such conflicts.

You must renew your sense of dedication, privately and jointly. I have some definite proposals, and I suggest that you take advantage of them. I am mainly going to suggest the use of certain techniques with which you are quite familiar. You have not used them as a way of life because of the conflicts mentioned earlier, and if you are going to get off dead center and do something instead of complaining, you must each begin to put these to practice. They worked well years ago, before you tried to wed two systems of belief to each other.

You have been straddling levels of consciousness, in other words, so that the events of your lives have shown gaps that we want to close. Please understand that these gaps are also the results, partially, of certain achievements—as your conflicts about taxes could not have existed years ago. That is simply a small example. When you began to expand your ideas of reality, you naturally attached them to goals that you held earlier, and tried to make them fit. Some of those goals were quite worthy, but carried beliefs along with them that were detrimental.

When you both had to work outside at least partially for a living, you did not have to consider your beliefs about creative time, or how to organize your day creatively. You were too busy trying to get rid of your jobs. Once that goal was reached, your beliefs about time and creativity became pertinent, as did the issues concerned with spontaneity and discipline.

Ruburt began to allow only psychic experiences that could be translated also—not primarily, you see—but also into financial productivity. You also wanted to wed your abilities in the same manner. You felt you could not afford free creative work. Ruburt felt that creative work could pay. Because of your ideas about time and creative work you felt that painting could not pay. Ruburt tricked you quite cleverly into doing the sketches for Dialogues—for your own good, he felt, and you did not enjoy the experience, allowing your beliefs to contaminate your creativity. You do not feel the world deserves creative work. Yet you have a nature that demands that you produce it.

Television at your dinner hour is advantageous, as long as it is not news. Occasionally you are helped by relaxing in such a manner for several hours. Often, however, this is dead time because your worries have so tired you. Several evenings a week, therefore, I suggest that the two of you pursue a period of psychic activity, as per Ruburt’s library, though with whatever variations suggest themselves. You need not be overly earnest at such times, however. I am not concerned about our book, the latest one. I am intent, however, about a new beginning, a new dedication, so that your own purposes become clearer, and your abilities better used. Conventional ideas of the psychic world have eroded both of your attitudes. In many cases, as with Kubler-Ross, it is again an issue of high insight occurring but put at the service of conventionalized beliefs.

Ruburt felt intensely alone in that regard. Hearing so many stories about out-of-body encounters, for example, he became frightened. You simply told him that was beneath his abilities, without understanding the sense of loneliness, or the fear generated by conventionalized beliefs, which before his own experiences he did not encounter. The relaxation and psy-time will help there, however.

Then we will see some results. I will comment at our next session, then. I want the two of you to discuss this session, and begin each day with a sense of dedication. I want you to encourage each other’s strengths honestly, and not reinforce your weaknesses. You cannot change your lives by complaining, or by saying “Yes, I have certain beliefs,” and accepting them. You cannot preserve the status quo, and be creative.