“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The inner self is embarked upon an exciting endeavor, in which it learns how to translate its reality into physical terms. The conscious mind is brilliantly attuned to physical reality, then, and often so dazzled by what it perceives that it is tempted to think physical phenomena is a cause, rather than a result. Deeper portions of the self always serve to remind it that this is not the case. When the conscious mind accepts too many false beliefs, particularly if it sees that inner self as a danger, then it closes out these constant reminders. When this situation arises the conscious mind feels itself assailed by a reality that seems greater than itself, over which it has no control. The deep feeling of security in which it should be anchored is lost.

Your inner self adopts the physically conscious, physically focused mind as a method of allowing it to manipulate in the world that you know. The conscious mind is particularly equipped to direct outward activity, to handle waking experience and oversee physical work.

Its beliefs about the nature of reality are then given to inner portions of the self. These rely mainly upon the conscious mind’s interpretation of temporal reality. The conscious mind sets the goals and the inner self brings them about, using all its facilities and inexhaustible energy.

There is no battle between the intuitive self and the conscious mind. There only seems to be when the individual refuses to face all the information that is available in his conscious mind. (Pause.) Sometimes it seems easier to avoid the frequent readjustments in behavior that self-examination requires. In such cases an individual collects many secondhand beliefs. Some contradict each other; the signals given to the body and to the inner self are not smoothly flowing or clear-cut, but a muddied jumble of counter-directions.

(“As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment. Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. [...] The subconscious is the seat of the emotions and is a creative mind. [...]

(Notes by Jane from Murphy’s Power of the Subconscious Mind: “The power of your subconscious is enormous. [...] You can discover the miracle-working power of the subconscious by plainly stating to your subconscious mind, prior to sleep, that you wish a certain specific thing accomplished. [...] Your subconscious mind is the source of your ideals, aspirations, and altruistic urges.”

(“It is a universal truth that whatever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as condition, experience, and event. [...] The reaction is a response from your subconscious mind which corresponds with the nature of your thought. Your subconscious mind can be likened to the soil which can grow all kinds of seeds, good or bad. [...]

(“Whatever thoughts, beliefs, opinions, theories, or dogmas you write, engrave, or impress on your subconscious mind... [...]

(As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment. Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. [...] The subconscious is the seat of the emotions and is a creative mind. [...]

(It is a universal truth that whatever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as condition, experience and event. [...] The reaction is a response from your subconscious mind which corresponds with the nature of your thought. Your subconscious mind can be likened to the soil which can grow all kinds of seeds, good or bad. [...]

[...] You can discover the miracle-working power of the subconscious by plainly stating to your subconscious mind, prior to sleep, that you wish a specific thing accomplished. [...] Your subconscious mind is the source of your ideals, aspirations and altruistic urges. [...]

(Notes by Jane from Dr. Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. [...]

[...] Perfect health is mine, and the Law of Harmony operates in my mind and body. [...] I know my major premise is based on the eternal truths of life, and I know, feel, and believe that my subconscious mind responds according to the nature of my conscious mind thinking.

[...] The healing intelligence of her subconscious mind which created her body is now transforming every cell, nerve, tissue, muscle, and bone of her being according to the perfect pattern of all organs lodged in her subconscious mind.

[...] Each buyer is sent to me by the creative intelligence of my subconscious mind, which makes no mistakes. [...] The deeper currents of my subconscious mind are now in operation bringing the buyers and myself together in divine order. [...]

[...] By using the powers of your subconscious mind correctly, you free your mind of all sense of competition and anxiety in buying and selling.)

When you turn off what you think of as your conscious mind, then another conscious mind clicks into focus. You have more than one conscious mind. [...] When you cease using the conscious mind that you know, there is another one that will take over—you do not sink into a limbo. You are used to thinking of hypnosis in this following manner: You seem to think, most of you, that the conscious mind is blocked out, and then what follows is a murky and a shadowy version of the normal conscious mind—that the subconscious, for example, deals with material that you cannot understand consciously. [...]

The facts are that when you close off the conscious mind that you know, another more alert conscious mind takes over; a conscious mind that belongs to you that has far more vision than the one you usually use; a conscious mind that is aware of more than you are usually aware of. [...]

[...] What I objected to in your recording was the implication that once the conscious mind as you know it was quieted there was no other conscious mind to take over, and that the ordinary conscious mind was the only conscious mind that you have. [...]

[...] You have more than one conscious mind. [...] We want you momentarily to stop using one of your conscious minds and learn how to tune into another one of your conscious minds. [...]

(Long pause at 4:06.) It is sometimes fashionable to say that men and women have conscious minds, subconscious minds, and unconscious minds — but there is no such thing as an unconscious mind. [...]

You know that you have a conscious mind, of course. You also possess what is often called the subconscious, and this merely consists of feelings, thoughts or experiences that are connected to your conscious mind, but would be considered excess baggage if you had to be aware of them all of the time. [...]

If you tried to hold all of those subconscious memories uppermost in your mind all of the time, then you would literally be unable to think or act in the present moment at all. You do more or less have a certain access to your own subconscious mind, however. [...]

It seems evident to you that one person has one mind. You identify with the mind you use. [...] A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. [...] You have minds that are invisible. [...]

[...] It is not just that there are other functions of the mind, unused, but that in those terms you have other minds. You have one brain, it is true, but you allow it to use only one station, or to identify itself with only one mind of many.

These minds all work together to keep you alive through the physical structure of the brain. When you use all of these minds, then and only then do you become fully aware of your surroundings: You perceive reality more clearly than you do now, more sharply, brilliantly, and concisely. [...] You accept as yourself those other states of consciousness native to your other minds. [...]

[...] In the terms usually familiar to you, you think of “the conscious mind.” In those terms, there are many conscious minds. [...]

The conscious mind was [therefore] expected to perform alone, so to speak, ignoring the highly intuitive inner information that is also available to it. [...] Usually it is shoved away and disregarded because you have been taught that the conscious mind should not hold with such “nonsense.” So you have been told to trust your conscious mind, while at the same time you were led to believe it could only be aware of stimuli that came to it from the outside physical world.

(Pause.) There has been on the one hand a too-great reliance upon the conscious mind — while its characteristics and mechanisms were misunderstood — so that proponents of the “conscious-reasoning-mind-above-all” theories advocate a use of intellect and reasoning powers, while not recognizing their source in the inner self.

On the other hand there are those who stress the great value of the inner self, the emotional being, at the expense of the conscious mind. [...] (Pause.) The followers of this belief consider the conscious mind in such derogatory terms that it almost seems to be a supercilious cancer that sprouted like a growth upon man’s psyche-impeding rather than aiding his progress and understanding.

[...] Again, your conscious mind is meant to look into the exterior world and into the interior one. The conscious mind is a vehicle for the expression of the soul in corporeal terms.

[...] It is that the conscious mind does not understand the unconscious mind and that your conscious mind does not understand that it is frightened of demons and believes in their existence. His mind does not believe in demons, your unconscious mind does. [...]

[...] They are in the back of your mind and what you said earlier this evening was a rationalization, for you have hidden your own fears from yourself. [...]

(Long pause.) Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of the reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. [...] The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow’s street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses’ domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. [...]

In the dreaming state the characteristics of the reasoning mind become altered, and from a waking viewpoint it might seem distorted in its activity. [...] It is not organized according to the frameworks understood by the reasoning portions of your mind, and so to some extent in dreams you encounter large amounts of information that you cannot categorize.

Some of those abilities show themselves in those classified as mentally deficient simply because all of the powers of the reasoning mind are not activated. In children under such conditions, the reasoning mind has not yet developed in all of its aspects sufficiently, so that in a certain area direct cognition shines through with its brilliant capacity.

(Long pause.) In dreams the reasoning mind loosens its hold upon perception. [...] The reasoning mind attempts to catch what it can as it reassembles its abilities toward waking, but the net of its reasoning simply cannot hold that assemblage of information. [...]

[...] The very matter of your physical brain has its greater reality in the mind, and behind that mind is another mind, and behind that another, and yet all of this is your mind. The mind of the larger self you do not know.

You could not consciously handle these existences with one mind, as you think of mind, segmented. [...]

There are no presents or pasts to these minds, only simultaneous experience, and a creativity that constantly of itself and its existence creates more. [...]

[...] Larger mind does not.

[...] While the condition of the body is directed by the conscious mind in life, then, the idea or mental pattern for the body existed before the conscious mind’s connection with the physical brain.

[...] At the event of this mental seeding, the conscious mind, in your terms, is obviously not connected with the brain, which has not yet been formed in flesh. The idea of the body is held and made physical by a conscious mind.

As I also mentioned (in the 614th session in Chapter Two), the conscious mind is not basically cut off from the inner self or from those deep inner sources of knowledge available to it. The aware mind is not any one event, for that matter; it represents various portions of the inner self that “surface” at any given time.

Now it is here that the seeming division in the self occurs, for in physical life the conscious mind must be connected with the brain, and in terms of time that organ itself must grow and develop. [...] The portion that must “wait for” the brain’s development is the part you call in life “the conscious mind.”

Einstein used the miraculous aspects of his mind. Parts of the mind are almost completely undistorted. The mind is distributed throughout the whole physical body. The mind builds up about it the physical camouflages necessary for existence on your physical plane. The mind receives data from the inner senses and forms the camouflage necessary. The mind unconsciously or unself-consciously deals with the basic laws according to the camouflage effect that is vital for survival on your physical plane. The mind is the tool which must be used.

I dislike the use of so many terms; since the brain is observable, I am tempted to use it to cover all abilities pertaining to mind in general. [...] The mind contains the brain. Material which comes from the so-called subconscious comes from that part of the mind which knows no boundaries, either of time or space, and in a deeper sense knows no boundaries of species or planes in any manner. The simple fact is that you are using this portion of the mind as a tool. Exercising the brain exercises the mind also, but the mind has abilities of which the brain is ignorant.

[...] The mind deals with basic principles inherent on all planes. [...] The mind cannot be probed by physical instruments. [...] The mind is the connective. It is here that the secrets of the universe will be discovered, and the mind itself is the tool of discovery.

[...] You may say that the brain is the mind in camouflage. Imagination belongs to the mind. [...] But imagination is a property of mind, not brain, and no physical tool can force the imagination to conceive of an original conception or idea.

(9:45.) When your body and mind are working together then the relationship between the two goes smoothly, and their natural therapeutic systems place you in a state of health and grace. I told you earlier (in the 614th session in Chapter Two, for instance) that your feelings follow the flow of your beliefs, and if this does not seem true to you it is because you are not aware of the contents of your conscious mind. [...] You can close the eyes of your conscious mind also, and pretend not to see what is there. It is because you do not trust your own basic therapeutic nature, or really understand the conscious or unconscious mind, that you run to so many therapies that originate from without the self.

[...] The aware mind’s great leeway through the intellect, and its connection with the senses, makes it possible for any singly insignificant event to trigger such experience. Intense focus is a characteristic of the conscious mind, and you can call it narrow because it includes only the physical dimension; but within the scope of that corporeal field it has great freedom to interpret the given dimension in any way it chooses.

The conscious mind can, for instance, see a rose as a symbol of life or death, or joy or sadness, and under certain conditions its interpretation of a simple flower can trigger deep experiences that call up power and strength from the inner resources of being. [...] But the conscious mind is also a great synthesizer. [...]

[...] In one way, a state of grace or illumination happens where there is the greatest poised balance of the conscious mind with other levels of the psyche and body — a biological and spiritual recognition of the individual’s wholeness within himself and his relationship with the universe at large.

(10:45.) A certain kind of affirmation of self allows the brain to tune into these more spacious methods of perception that are the natural characteristics of the mind. [...] You will not use your spacious mind until you affirm its reality within yourself, and until you are ready to handle the additional data which will then become consciously available to one extent or another. But the spacious mind operates through your creaturehood; in your terms it represents latent abilities of consciousness that can be more or less normal functions.

An individual can tune into spacious-mind operation two or three times in a lifetime without realizing it, and have experiences that he finds difficult to interpret later. [...] A dual perception takes place in which the spacious mind is activated. By “activated” I mean that the physical organism is suddenly aware of [the spacious mind’s] existence.

The mind can interpret the experiences that the legs and the feet have, however, and by imaginatively using that sensual data can perceive the ant’s reality to some extent. Now when the mind races and runs, it sometimes has great difficulty interpreting its activities to the brain, which is usually concerned with other realities only to the extent that they impinge upon it.

Now: Ruburt’s mind is far more aware of other realities than his brain is, but he consciously believes in the greater reality of himself and his perceptions. The brain also possesses this belief, and so it opens itself as much as possible to the mind’s activities. [...]

In your present life the conscious mind assesses physical reality and has behind it all the energy, power and ability of the inner self at its disposal. [...] (See Chapter Two.) Because of its character, consciousness, or the conscious mind, cannot be swamped by too much detail, too much information. [...]

The conscious mind is itself developing and expanding. [...] The inner self brings about whatever results the conscious mind desires.

It does not leave the conscious mind at loose ends nor isolate it from the fountains of its own being. Because the conscious mind is part of the inner self, it is obviously made of the same energy, filled with the same vitality, and revitalized by the deep sources of creativity from which all being emerges.

[...] The miraculous constant translation of spirit into flesh is carried on with inexhaustible energy by these inner portions of being, but in all cases the inner self looks to the conscious mind for its assessment of the body’s condition and reality, and forms the image in line with the conscious mind’s beliefs.

[...] Existing in such diversified, rich environment-possibilities, the human psyche needed and developed a conscious mind that could make fairly concise and accurate “minute by minute” judgments and evaluations. As the conscious mind grew, now, so did the range of imagination. The conscious mind is a vehicle for the imagination in many ways. [...]

If you are focusing upon ideas of poverty, illness or lack, for example, your conscious mind also holds latently concepts of health, vigor and abundance. [...] The vast reservoir of energy and potential within you is called into action under the leadership of your conscious mind.

[...] Your mind is meant to perceive the physical environment clearly, and its judgments about the environment then activate the body’s mechanisms to bring about proper response. [...]

The mind does not hold just active beliefs. [...]

As you apprehend them through association you come quite close to examining the contents of your mind in a free fashion. But if you drop the time concept and then view the conscious content of your mind through other core ideas, you are still structuring. [...] Build them up or tear them down, but do not allow yourself to become blind to the furniture of your own mind.

[...] If you are not accustomed to examining your own mind, then you can allow separate growths of this kind to form about a belief until you cannot distinguish one from the other. [...] (Seth called for the hyphen.) Data that seems unrelated to this core belief is then not assimilated but thrown into the corners of your mind, unused, and you are denied the value of the information.

(10:00.) Usually when you look into your conscious mind you do so for a particular reason, to find some information. But if you have schooled yourself to believe that such data is not consciously available, then it will not occur to you to find it in your conscious mind. [...]

[...] They become invisible, therefore, unless you become aware of the contents of your conscious mind.

In physical life, your conscious mind is largely dependent upon the workings of your physical brain. You have a conscious mind whether you are in flesh or out of it, but when you are physically oriented, then it is connected to the physical brain.

The brain to some extent keeps the mind to a three-dimensional focus. It orients you toward the environment in which you must operate, and it is because of the mind’s allegiance with the temporal brain that you perceive, for example, time as a series of moments.

The brain channels the information that the mind receives to your physical structure, so that your experience is physically sifted and automatically translated into terms that the organism can understand. (Seth-Jane spoke emphatically, rapping upon the coffee table between us.) Because of this, physically speaking and in life as you think of it, the mind is to a large extent dependent upon the brain’s growth and activity. [...]

[...] It is vital that you realize you are working with beliefs in your mind — that the real work is done there in the mind — and not look for immediate physical results.

The conscious mind is endlessly creative. This applies to all areas of conscious-mind thinking. [...] The latter are also the result of the aware mind’s capacity to play upon, mix and merge, and rearrange perception and experience.

We have mentioned reincarnation hardly at all (but see the 631st session in Chapter Seven), yet here let me state that the theory is a conscious-mind interpretation in linear terms. [...] On the other hand it is a creative interpretation, as the conscious mind plays with reality as it understands it. [...]

[...] With the large freedom provided by the conscious mind, however, man could stray from that great inner joy of being, forget it, disbelieve in it, or use his free will to deny its existence.

Now: Artificial guilt is still highly creative in its way, an offshoot made in man’s image as his conscious mind began to consider and play upon the natural innocent guilt that originally implied no punishment.