“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will then resume dictation. (Pause.) Your beliefs generate emotion. It is somewhat fashionable to place feelings above conscious thoughts, the idea being that emotions are more basic and natural than conscious reasoning is. The two actually go together but your conscious thinking largely determines your emotions, and not the other way around. Your beliefs generate the appropriate emotion that is implied. A long period of inner depression does not just come upon you. Your emotions do not betray you. Instead, over a period of time you have been consciously entertaining negative beliefs that then generated the strong feelings of despondency.

(Pause at 10:22.) Here the belief itself will generate the negative emotions that will, indeed, bring about a physical or emotional illness. The imagination will follow, painting dire mental pictures of a particular condition. Before long physical data bears out the negative belief; negative in that it is far less desirable than a concept of health.

One belief, of course, can be dependent upon many others, each generating its own emotion and imaginative reality. The belief in illness itself depends upon a belief in human unworthiness, guilt and imperfection, for example.

Your emotions and your imagination both follow your belief. When the belief vanishes then the same emotional context is no longer entertained, and your imagination turns in other directions. Beliefs automatically mobilize your emotional and imaginative powers.

Few beliefs are intellectual alone. When you are examining the contents of your conscious mind, you must learn, or recognize, the emotional and imaginative connotations that are connected with a given idea. There are various ways of altering the belief by substituting its opposite. [...] You generate the emotion opposite the one that arises from the belief you want to change, and you turn your imagination in the opposite direction from the one dictated by the belief. At the same time you consciously assure yourself that the unsatisfactory belief is an idea about reality and not an aspect of reality itself.

(9:46.) Largely, but not completely, your imagination follows your beliefs, as do your emotions. [...] It will stop when the hurt stops, and the emotion behind the cry will automatically change into another. But if the child discovers that a prolonged cry after the event gets extra attention and consideration, then it will begin to extend the emotion.

Your beliefs automatically attract the appropriate emotions. They reinforce themselves through imagination; and at the risk of repeating myself, because this is so important: Imagination and feeling follow your beliefs. [...]

The only way out of it is to become aware of your beliefs, aware of your own conscious thought, and to change your beliefs so that you bring them more in line with the kind of reality you want to experience. Imagination and emotion will then automatically come into play to reinforce the new beliefs.

[...] Imagination and emotion are your great allies. [...] You can see why it is so important that you examine all of your beliefs about yourself and the nature of your reality; and one belief, if you let it, will lead you to another.

[...] Your emotions trigger your memories, and they organize your associations. Your emotions are generated through your beliefs. They attach themselves so that certain beliefs and emotions seem almost synonymous.

[...] You might wonder if your aunt will take an anticipated journey to Europe next year, and that thought might give birth to images of an imagined future. All of these thoughts and images will be colored by the emotions that are connected to the letter, and to all of the events with which you and your aunt have been involved.

[...] At the same time, such beliefs convince them that the self is evil. These beliefs must be weeded out. [...] The psyche’s organizations are broader, and in their way more rational than most of your conscious beliefs about the self.

(10:28.) Now: (Long pause.) Mankind is a species (long pause) that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary. Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes. The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience. It connects your emotions and your reason. [...]

The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement. Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically. Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society. The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand.

[...] And again, the survival of the species in those terms is basically dependent upon its belief in the meaningfulness of its existence. (Emphatically:) These new cults and groups, however—these new cults and groups, therefore—therefore—are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief. And if some of their present beliefs are ludicrous in the light of the intellect’s reason, in the end—because [such groups] are following the dictates of value fulfillment, however feebly—they are significant. [...]

You must therefore understand and examine your beliefs, realize that they form your experience, and consciously change those that do not give the effects you want. In such an examination you will be aware of many excellent beliefs that work for you. [...] See how they were followed by your imagination and emotions. [...]

[...] To do this you have, hopefully, begun to examine your beliefs. [...] I told you (in the 619th session) to imagine a game in which you see yourself acting in line with the new desired belief. [...]

[...] You yourself must change your beliefs. You must stop believing that the inner self is a dungeon of unsavory repressed emotion. It does contain some repressed emotion. [...]

You have many of the beliefs of your culture, though you have broken apart from many. You still allow your imagination to follow your negative beliefs, thus you (me, RFB) are often unable to encourage Ruburt actively, as he is often unable to encourage himself.

[...] As I told you, the reasons behind the body beliefs have largely vanished. You are left with beliefs about the body. These, denied the core beliefs that gave them birth, would naturally begin to weaken but could linger for some time, generally speaking, unless they were recognized as beliefs.

Your imaginations and emotions must be utilized constructively, and not to prolong the effects. [...]

(10:05.) The inner mechanics of emotions and beliefs are complicated, but these are individuals who feel that physical life has failed them. [...] They think in black and white, and conflicts between their emotions, and their beliefs about their emotions, lead them to seek some kind of shelter in a rigid belief system that will give them rules to go by. [...]

[...] Man experiences ambitions, desires, likes and dislikes of a highly emotional nature — and at the same time he has intellectual beliefs about himself, his feelings, and the world. [...]

The organization of your feelings, beliefs, and intents directs the focus about which your physical reality is built. [...] If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that you attract to yourself events that — again — will confirm your beliefs.

(“Many of those old beliefs still have an emotional hold, however, and some helpful beliefs have also been overdone, or carried on too long. Because you can see so clearly the failings of your age, you each have a tendency to exaggerate them, or rather to concentrate upon them, so that you do not have an emotional feeling of safety. [...]

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rockbed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. [...] Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality. [...] Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs. [...]

Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then. [...] Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective — or somehow not real — and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his imagination directly in the old manner. He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination. The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for you, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs then engender.

[...] He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions. He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the gods of Olympus, for example. [...]

[...] It is far more complicated — and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another. Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured — and in those days the cures worked.

[...] While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. [...] As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of the imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not. [...]

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. [...] The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. [...]

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. [...]

[...] You are usually told that your emotions or beliefs or system of values have nothing to do with the unfortunate circumstances that beset you.

[...] Your imagination adds motivating and propelling power to such images, and so you will find that many of your beliefs are entertained by you in an inner visual manner. [...]

[...] Your emotions will fill in the patterns with light. Your imagination will forge these together.

[...] They try to imagine what death is like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. [...]

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them—as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

[...] I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. [...]

The theory of evolution,⁴ for instance, is an imaginative construct, and yet through its lights some generations now have viewed their world. [...] Your institutions change their aspects accordingly, so that experience fits the beliefs that you have about it. [...] You view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure your subjective experience and your objective circumstances.

Your experience of history, of the days of your life, is invisibly formed by those ideas that exist in the imagination only, and then are projected upon the physical world. This applies to your individual beliefs about yourself and the way you see yourself in your imagination. [...]

Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination — a feat that does distinguish him from the animals. What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination. [...] You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth. You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes. Unless you think quite consistently — and deeply — the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.

The formation of events is initially an emotional, psychic, or psychological function. [...] Events are organized according to laws that involve love, belief, intent, and the intensities with which these are entertained.

Physical play is pleasant, and accompanied by high imaginative activity. [...] Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are — not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events. [...]

[...] Here the mass shared environment is encountered as physical reality according to individual belief, love, and intent. [...] Therefore they behave like victims, and their beliefs reinforce such experience.

For now, I simply want to suggest that all such beliefs should be understood and dismissed as soon as possible. We hope to show how most natural health-promoting beliefs can be applied to all mental, physical, or emotional illnesses or difficulties. I want to assure you that regardless of your circumstances, age, or sex, you can indeed start over, rearousing from within yourself those earlier, more innocent expectations, feelings and beliefs. It is much better if you can imagine this endeavor more in the light of children’s play, in fact, rather than think of it as a deadly serious adult pursuit.

The thoughts and beliefs that we want to rearouse are those that were often predominant in childhood, as mentioned earlier in this book. They are spiritual, mental, emotional and biological beliefs that are innately present in the birth of each creature. [...]

There is no need to search endlessly into the past of this life or any other, for the “original” causes for beliefs. Making a change in the present of a certain kind will automatically alter all beliefs “across the board,” so to speak. [...] You react to your beliefs habitually, often unthinkingly, and in usual ideas of time, and in your experience of it — you must allow yourself “some time” to change that habitual behavior.

[...] It is rather futile to ever wish that you were both “at one with the world,” or to imagine yourselves following its beliefs blindly, but in blissful ignorance.

You accept certain ideas and beliefs as a part of your world view, as everyone does. As a youngster, you—and also Ruburt—challenged many of “the world’s” beliefs, and refused to accept them as a part of your personalized world views.

[...] Your world view includes paintings that exist in your imagination, as well as paintings done in your terms “so far.”

The emotions and the imagination, however, give you your closest contact with other portions of your own reality. [...]

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. [...] Therefore the imagination is often considered suspect.

[...] It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feels its own emotional power leap. Your emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified — raised, say, to a higher power. [...]

[...] Ask yourself how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was. If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

Those who imagine they look upon nature with the most objective of eyes are those whose subjective beliefs blind them most of all, for they cannot see through their own misinterpretations. It has been said that statistics can be made to say two things at once, both contradictory; so the facts of nature can be read in completely different fashions as they are put together with the organizational abilities of the mind operating through the brain’s beliefs. [...]

[...] It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions. This means that he denies a certain portion of his own humanity, and then is forced to overreact in expressing those emotions left open to him. [...]

[...] It is not simply that disease is disease, and relationships are relationships, but that the individual generally tries to achieve the best possible conditions for a satisfying spiritual, emotional and physical existence according to beliefs and intents.

There is no separation between body and mind, so that the body has emotional considerations to take into consideration also. [...] Such a person may, however, according to intents and beliefs and focus, be in fairly decent physical health —because health may be a prerogative.

[...] Watch television or whatever, but imagine—lightly, now—a pyramid with each of you at its base, going upward into Framework 2. The energy you sense in whatever program you watch imagine almost like a generator, as energy here drawing power from Framework 2 into the room, into Ruburt’s body and your own, activating both your physical and psychic existences.