“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

HEALTH, GOOD AND BAD THOUGHTS, AND THE BIRTH OF “DEMONS”

The chapter is to be called, “Health, Good and Bad Thoughts, and the Birth of ‘Demons.’ ” And you may take your break.

[...] The fact is that man began to believe in demons when he started to feel a sense of guilt. [...]

Demons of any kind are the result of your beliefs. [...]

[...] It has been during the annals of history, but many of those fashions also indisputably, and with the best of intentions, managed to give a faulty picture: you ended up with your gods and demons, unwieldy methods and cults, and often with the intellect downgraded. [...]

When people using such methods are told that their writing comes through from a demon or the devil, or an evil spirit, then those invisible beliefs are shoved farther away. [...]

[...] I didn’t believe in gods or demons, so I didn’t fear them. [...]

One episode in particular is funny in retrospect — looking back it was certainly undisciplined — but at least it was not overshadowed by superstitious fears about demons; and it led to the episode with which I will close the first portion of this book. [...]

[...] Instead of thinking you are in contact with a great philosopher or “ancient soul,” you may believe that you are instead visiting with a demon or a devil, or that you are possessed of an evil spirit.

[...] There is nothing unconventional about gods and demons, good spirits or bad spirits. [...]

[...] “I got the heading earlier for the next chapter: “‘Messages’ From Gods, Demons, Heroes, and Other Prominent Persons — or, More Conflicting Beliefs.”)

[...] If you probe into these realms you will be forced to perceive them with the root assumptions of your own system, translating feelings of warmth and comfort, for example, into images of warm shelters or buildings, or feelings of fear into images of demons.

[...] There, if you believe in demons, you will see them — without ever realizing that they are part of the environment of your psyche, formed by your beliefs, and thrown out as mirages over a very real environment that you do not perceive. You will believe the psychic tour books and go hunting for demons instead of tigers.

[...] Although I’d read of people being attacked by demons or the like while they were “projecting,” I just didn’t believe in demons. [...]

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN:

Dreams—A Pseudo-Demon—
Therapeutic Dreaming

(11:01.) When you think in other terms, then you fall into distorted views in which power is assigned to negative elements — and seen as threatening, wrong, or even given demonic connotations. [...]

[...] Will I be greeted by gods or demons, enemies, or beloved ones? [...]

[...] One person may symbolize fear as a demon, as an unfriendly animal, or even as some perfectly simple ordinarily harmless object; but if you know what your own symbols mean, then you can use the knowledge not only to interpret your dreams but also as signposts to the state of consciousness in which they usually occur.

[...] He thought of turning his symptoms, or the fears behind them, into a demon which he could then slay and conquer for good. [...]

If I’ve gone kinky— / legs at crazy angles— /
arms half bent— / no longer walking upright— /
a physical outcast— / and a mental speed-demon— /
well, no more apologies—from me / to me.

Now I have told you often that demons, in those terms, do not exist. [...]

([Jane:] “ ‘Cause you all have to come to terms with the divinity within yourselves, some with the demon aspect, but with the divinity. [...]

[...] (Quite successfully.) Once he saw himself simply (underlined) as a psychic, he became prey to all of the conventional psychic ideas, afraid of the sexual-demon characteristics connected with out-of-bodies, for example.

The main issue, however, in that particular era, was a shared belief system, a system that consisted of, among other things, implied images that were neither here nor there—neither entirely earthly nor entirely divine—a mythology of God, angels, demons, an entire host of Biblical characters that were images in man’s imagination, images to be physically portrayed. [...]

[...] It is useless to personify a storm and treat it as a demon, focusing upon its destructive elements, or those elements that to you appear destructive.