“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It seldom occurs to you that you might be fulfilling your purposes quite beautifully despite all of your convictions—for they are indeed convictions—that you are not doing so, or that in some way or another each of you should be different in important ways than you are.

(10:32.) Your young man, your visitor, does indeed suffer torments because he is so thoroughly convinced he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of his unfortunate experiences follow that conviction, which so far he has refused to give up. Incidentally, you both handled that affair very well. You avoided the kind of direct confrontation that would have resulted had you said, for example “I do not believe your spirit,” or “I do not believe he could do thus and so.” Your whole attitude showed the young man, however, that he was the one who must examine his own beliefs, and without immediately panicking him you showed by inference your own belief that his delusion was doing him considerable harm.

When you hold such a conviction you are always convinced that something is wrong, and your belief brings about a condition which gives you justification for feeling that. Ruburt can say “Of course there is something wrong with me. Look at my condition.” But the condition began when he began to believe that he should be different than he is.

Your own chest feelings emerge when you feel you should be different than you are. We are not speaking of perfection, yet you are each perfectly yourselves. The feeling that there is something wrong then begins to become a strong significance in your lives. Without check, it begins to gain its own momentum, so that you become less and less aware of what is right, and more and more begin to focus looking for proof of your conviction.

Almost in every instance, when you are upset in any way, this is a reflection of your feeling that you should be different than you are—your conviction that you have gone wrong in an important area. That conviction closes off your understanding, so that your own rightness is not apparent, so that a vital dimension is lost, practically speaking.