“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are too many levels here to discuss all at once … One such level reinforces a trust in himself. The trust is accepted, however, because he is finally ready to work through the issues. As given [at various times over the years, mostly in personal material], they involve cultural training and religious indoctrinations.⁴ He is challenging, finally, the old beliefs that say that the self’s spontaneity is not to be trusted. He is challenging those ideas emotionally and philosophically, uniting physical action and inner mobility. In the past he was still afraid to touch those beliefs with any but the slightest of hands.

They were not only his private religious beliefs, but those of his contemporaries generally — and (loudly:) the foundations upon which your present civilization was made. He had to find the courage to encounter those old beliefs boldly, and he is finally doing so. I will have more to say to him in the dream state this evening, and I will shortly explain his experience with my voice.

(10:16.) Now: In almost all instances, demons in dreams represent the dreamer’s belief in evil, instantly materialized. They are not the inhabitants of some nether world, then, or underground. We will be giving some instructions that will enable readers to experiment with the projection of consciousness at least to some extent. It is very important for you to realize that even in dreams you form your own reality. Your state of mind, freed from its usual physical focus, creatively expresses itself in all of its power and brilliance. The state of mind itself serves as an intent, propelling you into realities of like conditions.

The inner lands have not been as well explored. To say the least, they lie in virgin territory as far as your conscious mind is concerned. Others have journeyed to some of these interior locales, but since they were indeed explorers they had to learn as they went along. Some, returning, provided guidebooks or travel folders, telling us what could be expected. You make your own reality. If you were from a foreign land and asked one person to give you a description of New York City, you might take his or her description for reality. The person might say “New York City is a frightful place in which crime is rampant, gangs roam the streets, murders and rapes are the norm, and people are not only impolite but ready to attack you at a moment’s notice. There are no trees. The air is polluted, and you can expect only violence.” If you asked someone else, this individual might say instead: “New York City has the finest of museums, open-air concerts in some of the parks, fine sculpture, theater, and probably the greatest collection of books outside of the Vatican. It has a good overall climate, a great mixture of cultures. In it, millions of people go their way daily in freedom.” Period. Both people would be speaking about the same locale. Their descriptions would vary because of their private beliefs, and would be colored by the individual focus from which each of them viewed that city.

[...] Given those points, she’s bound to have differences of belief with other views of reality.

(Yet I think more is involved than choosing among the belief systems offered by Eastern or Western cultures, for instance — that is, in more basic terms each personality would make that kind of choice before physical birth, with the full understanding of the vast influence such a decision would have upon a life’s work. [...]

[...] We could easily take a book to present the reasons for our particular beliefs, examining them in connection with both Eastern and Western religious philosophies. [...]

Yet Buddhist belief, for instance, maintains that our perception of the world is not fundamental, but an illusion; our “ignorance” of this basic undifferentiated “suchness” then results in the division of reality into objects and ideas. [...]