“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: in basic terms you form your reality, privately and en masse—through your beliefs, of course, and those beliefs cause you to organize your psychic world in certain fashions.

You use such belief organizations to concentrate upon certain data and ignore other, so that consciously and unconsciously you organize inner and outer stimuli so that it makes sense according to your beliefs, and forms therefore a more or less dependable framework in which action and response are possible.

History is written according to the present beliefs of a historian in his time. As you know, your western world followed its own mixture of Christianity, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology. Because those ideas still are largely in the mainstream of your society, your television news, newspapers, and magazines are invisibly slanted. The news is invisibly organized to fit certain patterns, so that when you read or hear it, it carries the seemingly indelible mark, confirming the basic beliefs of the culture.

For the newspapers also act in a suggestive fashion, further programming your expectations. In a way you organize your physical experience as you do your inner life, through association, through emotional association. I am not simple speaking of sensationalism in newspapers or on TV. When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

I am, again, not telling you to be blind to physical events, but to realize that the news media, and your organizations, are not giving you an “objective” view of the world, but a view compounded and composed by Freudian and Darwinian beliefs. I would also like to remind you both of the difference between direct experience and second-handed tales. Examine your own personal experience with physical reality now and then when you have a moment (with irony), relying only upon your own experience. It is impossible, I know, and not really beneficial, to try to separate yourselves entirely from the cultural world, but you should understand the makeup of that world, and be able now and then at least to separate your private experiences from it, even though they must occur in its context.

Your neighbor, Joe, had pneumonia, or a cold, or the snivels (upon returning from Florida last week). To Margaret he had pneumonia, because she organizes reality in a certain fashion, and by slightly exaggerating certain data, she then uses it to reinforce certain beliefs. She then must take steps of course to protect herself against illness, and she is in fear of robbers for the same reason.

Collecting such distorted data about inner or outer worlds can only make an individual build up defenses, or want to. The newspaper world is, then, highly distorted, organized in such a manner that its data reinforce negative beliefs, and constantly give evidence only of negative patterns. These then are taken as an objective picture of the fact world.

All of the heroism, the private and even mass triumph, and the good intent, have been left out. The world is seen as a patient, sick in body, insane of mind, a thing that needs treatment, a Freudian and Darwinian monster. Even with your own changed beliefs, the two of you still see that mirror when you read a newspaper, and do not realize the invisible organizations behind the news. It makes it seem foolhardy to relax, doesn’t it? (Ironically, leaning forward for emphasis.)

(11:01.) The newspapers act as hypnotic suggestion of a potent kind. There is no one present who can confirm the newspaper’s evidence. You cannot ask questions of a newspaper, or of a news program. The entire pattern of these latest sessions deals with your inner reactions to your beliefs about yourselves and the world. Tonight I am dealing with a specific area. To some extent, however. These newspaper beliefs shut you off from full utilization from Framework 2’s potency.