Imagination and beliefs. II

Seth
Imagination and beliefs. II

We resume dictation. Beliefs generate emotion. Now one tends to believe that feelings are above conscious thoughts, and that emotions are more basic and natural than conscious reasoning. The truth is that the two go together, but conscious thinking largely determines emotions, not vice versa. Beliefs generate the proper emotion that is involved. A long period of internal depression, for example, does not just happen. Emotions do not betray you. Rather, over time you consciously maintain negative beliefs that then generate the intense feelings of dejection.

If you could rely on emotion over conscious reasoning, conscious thinking would not make much sense, you would not need it.

Neither are you at the mercy of emotions, because they follow the flow of reasoning. The mind is designed to perceive the physical environment clearly, and the judgments it makes about the environment activate the body's mechanisms to elicit an adequate response. If your beliefs about existence are fearful, emotional reactions will lead to depression. In this case, it is your value judgments that you must review.

Imagination enlivens emotions, and also faithfully obeys beliefs. As you think, you feel, and not the other way around.

Later we will make some comments about hypnotism. Now I want to mention that you are hypnotizing constantly with your conscious thoughts and suggestions. The term "hypnosis" refers simply to a fairly normal state in which you concentrate your attention by narrowing the focus field in a particular area of ​​thought or belief.

You concentrate with great energy on one idea, usually excluding others. It is a "conscious" attitude.

As such, it also shows the importance of beliefs, since by employing hypnosis you forcibly feed a belief in you, or one given to you by another person, the "hypnotist." But the fact is that you concentrate all the attention on the idea that is presented to you.

In this case, as in normal life, emotions and actions obey beliefs. If you believe that you are sick, to all effect "you are" sick. If you believe that you are healthy, then you are "healthy." Much has been written about the nature of healing, and in this book we will discuss this subject, but there is also the "reverse cure", that is, a person who loses his belief about his health and accepts instead the idea of The personal disease.

In this case, the belief itself generates the negative emotions that end up producing a physical or emotional illness. Imagination obeys the belief and presents hideous mental images of a particular illness. In a short time physical data will corroborate the negative belief; Negative in the sense that it is much less desirable than a concept of health.

I mention this here simply because, in the general development of a person, a disease can also be used as a method to achieve a constructive purpose. In such a case there is also a belief involved: the person believes that an unhealthy state is the best way to achieve another purpose.

Because of his personal beliefs, he thinks that any other medium is inaccessible; That is to say, there is a gap in his experience that prevents him from seeing another way to reach the same end. We will discuss this point in more detail later.

A belief, of course, can depend on many others, each of which generates its own emotion and imaginative reality. Belief in the disease itself depends, for example, on a belief in human indignity, guilt, and imperfection.

The mind holds not only active beliefs. It contains many others in a passive state, which remain dormant until you concentrate on them and use them. Any one of them can surface when a conscious thought acts as a stimulus.

When you are focused on ideas of poverty, disease or lack, for example, the conscious mind also holds latent concepts of health, vigor and abundance. If you divert thoughts from negative ideas to positive ones, your concentration begins to alter the balance. The vast reservoir of inner energy and potential is called into action under the direction of the conscious mind.

Since you reason as creatures and have at your disposal a great variety of experiences, the faculty of reasoning of the human species is designed to evolve and grow as it is used. Awareness expands as you use it. You become more "conscious" in exercising this faculty.

A flower can not write a poem on itself. You can, and in doing so the consciousness revolves around itself and becomes literally more than it was. Since the human psyche exists within a framework of very diverse possibilities and in a very rich environment, it had to develop a conscious mind that could make fairly concise and accurate judgments and estimates at every moment. As the conscious mind grew, so did the grasp of the imagination. The conscious mind is a vehicle of the imagination in many ways. The greater your knowledge, the greater the scope of the imagination. At the same time, imagination enriches conscious reason and emotional experience.

As you have not learned to use the consciousness properly or fully, it seems that imagination, emotions and reason are separate faculties, or sometimes contradicted. The conscious mind matures, I repeat, accepting information from both the outer and the inner world. It is only when you believe that consciousness has to be attuned exclusively to external conditions, you force it to isolate itself from internal knowledge, intuitive "voices," and from the depths from which it emerges.

Seth spoke through Jane five times last week. The nights of Monday and Wednesday gave us material for this book, plus other personal information for us; Spoke long and hard Tuesday night during the extrasensory perception class; Spoke briefly Friday afternoon for a guest editor of Time magazine on Freudian psychology; And on Saturday evening he talked colloquially with a group of friends of ours about everyday life in Italy during the time he had been an early pope of the fourth century. (About this reincarnation, Seth first mentioned his papal experience in a session of the extrasensory perception class, May 1971. See Chapter 11 of Speech Seth II.) (1)

Or only a few brief notes on the Sabbath material after our guests left. We had been talking about the current problems of population, when Seth intervened to tell us that in the fourth century infanticide - at least as far as he knew - had been quite common. Before they were baptized, the children were the property of the parents, who could do with them what they desired, without any disgrace.

Children who "survived" because they would have been an "impossible burden" for the economy of that time, housing, food supply, etc. They simply killed each other before baptism. Once the child was baptized, however, it became something sacred, having a soul and the right to live ...


Goodnight.

I am not minimizing the importance of the inner being. All your infinite resources are at "disposal" of the conscious mind, for your conscious purposes.

There has been an over-dependence on the conscious mind-despite the misunderstanding of its characteristics and mechanisms-so that proponents of theories that give preeminence to the "conscious rational mind" advocate a use of the intellect and the faculties of The reason, while they do not recognize their origin in the inner being.

(1) Ediciones Luciérnaga, Barcelona 1999, p. 223


It was expected, then, that the conscious mind would act alone, so to speak, ignoring the highly intuitive internal information that is also "at your disposal". It was not supposed to be aware of such information. But anyone knows very well that intuitive impressions, inspirations, precognitive information or clairvoyant material often surface in consciousness. Normally they are not paid attention or scorned, because they have been taught that the conscious mind should not harbor such "nonsense". So you have been instilled in trusting the conscious mind, while at the same time you were led to believe that it could only be aware of stimuli coming from the outer physical world.

On the other hand there are those who emphasize the great value of the inner being, the emotional being, at the "expense" of the conscious mind. These theories hold that the intellect and the habitual consciousness are well below the "unconscious" zones of the inner being, and that all the answers are hidden with the naked eye. The followers of this belief qualify the conscious mind in terms so pejorative that it almost seems to be a cancer that burst like a tumor in man's psyche and represents an obstacle rather than contributing to its progress and understanding.

Both groups ignore the miraculous unity of the psyche, the subtle natural bonds that exist between what are called conscious and unconscious mind, the incredibly rich interaction in which each contributes and takes.

The "unconscious" simply contains large fragments of your experience in which you do not believe because it has been taught to you. I repeat that the conscious mind is designed to observe both the outer and the inner world. The conscious mind is a vehicle for the soul to express itself in a corporeal way.

Its function is to evaluate the temporal experience according to the beliefs it holds about the nature of reality, and automatically causes the body to react in a certain way. I will not tire of saying it: your beliefs form your reality, your body and state, your personal relationships, your environment and, together, your civilization and your world.

Beliefs automatically attract the appropriate emotions, and are reinforced through the imagination. Again I repeat it, because it is of great importance: imagination and feeling follow beliefs, not vice versa.

Let us now take a brief example. If you often meet a person who dislikes you, and you think, "This guy stirs my stomach," it will not be by chance that you end up with stomach discomfort every time you see him. It is a "conscious" suggestion you yourselves make and that is put into practice, not symbolically, but in a practical, literal way. In other words, the conscious mind gives its orders and the inner being carries them out.

In this existence you are oriented towards the physical. Thus, this conscious mind oriented toward the physical must be able to make inferences about the nature of physical reality. Otherwise you would not have free will.

From the Industrial Revolution, in the western culture the idea that there was very little relation between the objects of the world and the individual became strong. As this is not a history book I will not go into the reasons behind that idea, but I will only mention that it was an exaggerated reaction to the prevailing religious concepts.

Before that time man believed that he could affect matter and environment through his thoughts. With the Industrial Revolution, however, even the elements of nature lost their "living" quality in the eyes of man. They became objects capable of being classified, named, torn apart and examined.

No one dissects a cat or a dog that is your pet; So that when man began to dissect the universe in this way, he had already lost his sense of love towards him. The world became for him a soulless entity. Only then could he examine it without scruple "and without being aware of the living voice he protested." So in his great fascination to know what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand, for example, the inheritance of a flower, he forgot everything he could learn only by smelling a flower, watching it, seeing it she herself.

So he examined "still life." He often had to "kill" life in order, he thought, to discover his reality.

You can not understand what makes things live if they are robbed of life first. And so, when man learned to classify, calculate, and dissect nature, he became insensitive to the vital quality of nature and no longer felt part of it. Man greatly denied his inheritance, for spirit is born in nature and soul, and for a time resides in the flesh.

Man's thoughts no longer seemed to have any effect on nature because in his mind he was separated from nature. So, paradoxically, although he concentrated very consciously on the outer aspects of nature, he ended up denying the conscious powers of his own mind. He became blind to the connection between his thoughts and his physical environment and experience.

Nature then became an adversary to control. But, deep down, he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because by isolating himself from it he also refused the possibility of using many of his own faculties.

It was at this time that man so misunderstood the very nature of the conscious mind, and later schools of psychology attributed the unconscious parts of being to those unrecognized or rejected powers. Certain very natural functions of the conscious mind, therefore, were "buried" and prevented their normal use.

Now, as the conscious mind has undergone many tensions (and has stripped it of many of its characteristics), there is actually an overreaction that lowers the value of normal consciousness, so to speak.

Emotion and imagination are considered something very superior. The displaced powers of consciousness are still attributed to the unconscious, and great efforts are made to achieve what appear to be normally inaccessible areas of consciousness. For this purpose drugs are used, sects are created, and there is a great variety of methods and training manuals. However, there is nothing basically inaccessible in relation to that "internal knowledge or experience." Everything can be conscious, and used to enrich the reality that you know. The conscious mind is not a prodigal son or a poor relative of being. You can focus with total freedom on the inner reality when you understand that you can do it. I repeat that you "possess" a conscious mind, and you can change the focus of your own consciousness.

Among the many arbitrariness imposed by the race of man upon itself, one of the main ones is the idea that the conscious mind has no contact with the sources of its own being, which is separated from nature, and that the individual is Finds therefore at the mercy of unconscious impulses, over which he has no control.

So the man feels helpless. If the purpose of civilization is to allow the individual to live in peace, happiness, security and abundance, then that idea has served him well.

When a person feels that there is no relationship between his personal reality and experience and the environment of his world, he loses even the animal sense of pure propriety and belonging. I repeat that beliefs form reality, because they shape life and all its conditions.

All the powers of the inner being are activated as a result of conscious beliefs. You no longer feel "responsible" for your conscious thought because you have been taught that it is not he who gives shape to your life. They have told you that whatever your beliefs are, you are subject to unconscious conditioning.

(The following sentence must be fully emphasized :) "And while you harbor that conscious belief, you will experience it as reality."


Some of your beliefs originated in childhood, but you are not at your mercy unless you "believe" that you are. Since the imagination follows the thoughts, you can find yourself in a vicious circle because you constantly create images in the mind that reinforce the "negative" aspects of your life.

Imaginary events generate the corresponding emotions, which automatically cause hormonal changes (2) in the body or affect your behavior with other people, or cause you to interpret


(2) Hormones are secretions of different glands of the endocrine system (adrenals, thyroid, pancreas, etc.). Body fluids transport these substances to other organs or tissues, where they have certain effects. Here, as always, Seth asserts that we are not at the mercy of such involuntary processes.


Events always in the light of your beliefs. And so the daily experience seems to justify what you are increasingly believing with greater conviction.

The only way out is to be aware of one's beliefs, one's conscious thinking, and change one's beliefs so that they harmonize more with the kind of reality one wants to experience. Imagination and emotion will then automatically go into operation to reinforce new beliefs.

As I mentioned (in session 614), the first important step is to realize that beliefs about reality are just that - beliefs "about" reality - and not necessarily attributes of reality. You must draw a clear distinction between you and your beliefs. Then you must understand that your beliefs are physically materialized: what you believe to be true in your experience is true. To change the physical effect you have to change the original belief, even if you are aware that the physical materializations of the old beliefs can last for a while.

If you fully understand what I am saying, your new beliefs will begin to manifest in your experience not long after. But you should not worry about their appearance, for "this" would awaken the fear that new ideas will not materialize, with which you would deny your purpose.



SESSION 62O, II OCTOBER 1972 22O WEDNESDAY
SESSION 621, OCTOBER 16, 1972. 2I.4O MONDAY
Speech Seth III
Through Jane Roberts