The Nature of Personal Reality by Seth/Jane Roberts
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I've been aware of this book since the 70s and read it three times in the 90s. I'm writing this "review" now to introduce the main ideas in this book to a larger audience.
The world is full of problems: so many that people just seize up and become apathic. This isn't going to make things better.
In The Nature of Personal Reality by Seth/Jane Roberts, Seth introduces the idea that we create our personal realities out of our thoughts - out of our beliefs. If you believe that you're an insignificant, powerless serf in society that is what you're going to create. If you believe that you can make the world a better place: you will.
The old structures of society are collapsing because they were never viable in the first place. Don't be afraid. Don't be apathetic. Be creative.
You Create Your Own Reality
Below are the Table of Contents and some quotes from the first four chapters of Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality. 1974.
HH
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Seth (Jane Roberts: 1929-1984). The Nature of Personal Reality, 1974.
CONTENTS
Introduction by Jane Roberts
Preface by Seth: The Manufacture of Personal Reality
PART ONE: Where You and the World Meet
CHAPTER
1 The Living Picture of the World
2 Reality and Personal Beliefs
3 Suggestion, Telepathy, and the Grouping of Beliefs
4 Your Imagination and Your Beliefs, and a Few Words About the Origin of Your Beliefs
5 The Constant Creation of the Physical Body
6 The Body of Your Beliefs, and the Power Structures of Belief
7 The Living Flesh
8 Health, Good and Bad Thoughts, and the Birth of "Demons"
9 Natural Grace, the Framework of Creativity, and the Health of Your Body and Mind. The Birth of Conscience
PART TWO: Your Body as Your Own Unique Living Sculpture. Your Life as Your Most Intimate Work of Art, and the Nature of Creativity as It Applies to Your Personal Experience
CHAPTER
10 The Nature of Spontaneous Illumination, and the Nature of Enforced Illumination. The Soul in Chemical Clothes
11 The Conscious Mind as the Carrier of Beliefs. Your Beliefs in Relation to Health and Satisfaction
12 Grace, Conscience, and Your Daily Experience
13 Good and Evil, Personal and Mass Beliefs, and Their Effect Upon Your Private and Social Experience
14 Which You? Which World? Your Daily Reality as the Expression of Specific Probable Events
15 Which You? Which World? Only You Can Answer. How to Free Yourself From Limitations
16 Natural Hypnosis: A Trance Is a Trance Is a Trance
17 Natural Hypnosis, Healing, and the Transference of Physical Symptoms Into Other Levels of Activity
18 Inner Storms and Outer Storms. Creative "Destruction." The Length of the Day and the Natural Reach of a Biologically Based Consciousness
19 The Concentration of Energy, Beliefs, and the Present Point of Power
20 The Dream Landscape, the Physical World, Probabilities, and Your Daily Experience
21 Affirmation, Love, Acceptance, and Denial
22 Affirmation, the Practical Betterment of Your Life, and the New Structuring of Beliefs
Quotes:
The Manufacture of Personal Reality
Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that you know. You are hardly at the mercy of a reality, therefore, that exists apart from you, or is thrust upon you. You are so intimately connected with the physical events composing your life experience that often you cannot distinguish between the seemingly material occurrences and the thoughts, expectations and desires that gave them birth.
If there are strongly negative characteristics present in your most intimate thoughts, if these actually form bars between you and a more full life, still you often look through the bars, not seeing them. Until they are recognized they are impediments. Even obstacles have a reason for being. If they are your own, then it is up to you to recognize them and discover the circumstances behind their existence.
Your conscious thoughts can be great clues in uncovering such obstructions. You are not nearly as familiar with your own thoughts as you may imagine. They can escape from you like water through your fingers, carrying with them vital nutrients that spread across the landscape of your psyche -and all too often carrying sludge and mud that clog up the channels of experience and creativity.
An examination of your conscious thoughts will tell you much about the state of your inner mind, your intentions and expectations, and will often lead you to a direct confrontation with challenges and problems. Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going. They point clearly to the nature of physical events. What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule. (emphasis mine)
THE NATURE OF PERSONAL REALITY
Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche. Then you perceive this experience. Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances.
There is no other valid way of changing physical events. It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.
You change even the most permanent-seeming conditions of your life constantly through the varying attitudes you have toward them. There is nothing in your exterior experience that did not originate within you.
Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. In the most miraculous fashion are you given the gift of creating your experience.
In this existence you are learning to handle the inexhaustible energy that is available to you. The mass condition of the world, and the situation of each individual in it, is the materialization of man's progress as he forms his world.
The joy of creativity flows through you as effortlessly as your breath. From it the most minute areas of your outer experience spring. Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself. They group through attraction, building up areas of events and circumstances that finally coalesce, so to speak, either in matter as objects - or as events in "time."
You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.
You form the fabric of your experience through your own beliefs and expectations. These personal ideas about yourself and the nature of reality will affect your thoughts and emotions.
There is one belief, however, that destroys artificial barriers to perception, an expanding belief that automatically pierces false and inhibiting ideas. Now, separately:
The Self Is Not Limited.
That statement is a statement of fact. It exists regardless of your belief or disbelief in it. Following this concept is another:
There Are No Boundaries or Separations of the Self.
Those that you experience are the result of false beliefs. Following this is the idea that I have already mentioned:
You Make Your Own Reality.
First of all, you must realize that no one can change your beliefs for you, nor can they be forced upon you from without. You can indeed change them for yourself, however, with knowledge and application.
Look about you. Your entire physical environment is the materialization of your beliefs. Your sense of joy, sorrow, health or illness - all of these are also caused by your beliefs. If you believe that a given situation should make you unhappy, then it will, and the unhappiness will then reinforce the condition.
Within you is the ability to change your ideas about reality and about yourself, to create a personal living experience that is fulfilling to yourself and others. I would like you to write down your beliefs about yourself as you become aware of them.
Your ideas and beliefs form the structure of your experience. Your beliefs and the reasons for them can be found in your conscious mind.
The realization that you form your own reality should be a liberating one. You are responsible for your successes and your joys. You can change those areas of your life with which you are less than pleased, but you must take the responsibility for your being.
If you use your conscious mind properly, then, you examine those beliefs that come to you. You do not accept them willy-nilly. If you use your conscious(u) mind properly, you are also aware of intuitive ideas that come to you from within. You are only half conscious when you do not examine the information that comes to you from without, and when you ignore the data that comes to you from within.
If you dwell upon limitations, then you will meet them. You must create a new picture in your mind. It will differ from the picture your physical senses may show you at any given time, precisely in those areas where changes are required.
Hatred of war will not bring peace - another example. Only love of peace will bring about those conditions.
Once you understand that you form your reality, then you must begin to examine these beliefs by letting the conscious mind freely examine its own contents.
All you have to do is decide to examine the contents of your conscious mind, realizing that it contains treasures that you have overlooked.
Another way to do this is to recognize through examination that the physical effects you meet exist as data in your conscious mind - and the information that formerly seemed unavailable will be obvious. The seemingly invisible ideas that cause your difficulties have quite obvious visible physical effects, and these will lead you automatically to the conscious area in which the initiating beliefs or ideas reside.
Once more, if you become aware of your own conscious thoughts, these themselves will give you clues for they clearly speak your beliefs.
You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule.
It may be easy for you to see beliefs that are invisible to others in themselves. Reading this book, you may be able to point at friends or acquaintances and see clearly that their ideas are invisible beliefs which limit their experience - and yet be blind to your own invisible beliefs, which you take so readily as truth or characteristics of reality.
In writing down your list of personal beliefs, therefore, leave nothing out. Examine the list as though it belonged to someone else. I did not want to imply that you make a list of specifically negative ideas, however. It is of supreme importance that you recognize the existence of joyful beliefs, and take into consideration those elements of your own experience with which you have had success.
I want to you capture that feeling of accomplishment, and to translate it, or transfer it, to areas in which you have had difficulty. But you must remember that the ideas exist first and the experience physically follows.
You make your own reality. I cannot say this too often.
The truth that you form your reality directly. You react consciously and unconsciously to your beliefs. You collect from the physical universe, and the interior one, data that seems to correlate with your beliefs.
Believe, then, that you are a being unlimited by nature, born into flesh to materialize as best you can the great joy and spontaneity of your nature.
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.
They will follow as surely and certainly as the "bad" results
followed, and this must be a belief: that the good results will come. But the real work is done in the mind. If you do the work then you can rest assured of the results, but you must not check constantly for them....
I mentioned a game in which you playfully adopt an idea that you want to materialize, then imagine it happening in your mind. Know that all events are mental and psychic first and that these will happen in physical terms, but do not keep watching yourself. Continue with the game.
Because beliefs form reality - the structure of experience - any change in beliefs altering that structure initiates change to some extent, of course. The status quo which served a certain purpose is gone, new elements are introduced, another creative process begins.
Once more, if you think of daily life as an ever-moving three-dimensional painting with you as the artist, then you will realize that as your beliefs change so will your experience. You must accept the idea completely, however, that your beliefs for your experience. Discard those beliefs that are not bringing you those effects you want. In the meantime you will often be in the position of telling yourself that something is true in the face of physical data that seems completely contradictory. You may say, "I live amid abundance and am free from want," while your eyes tell you that the desk is piled with bills. You must realize that you are the one who produced that "physical evidence" that still faces you, and you did so through your beliefs.
So as you alter the belief, the physical evidence will gradually begin to "prove" your new belief as faithfully as it did your old one. You must work with your own ideas. While there are general categories of beliefs, and general reasons for them, you must become personally aware of your own, for no one person is completely like any other. The old beliefs served a purpose and fulfilled a need.
Listen to your own conversation as you speak with friends, and to theirs. See how you reinforce each other's beliefs. See how your imaginations often follow the same lines. All of this is quite out in the open if you realize that it is.
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. Trace these through. See how they were followed by your imagination and emotions. If possible, look in your own past for points where recognizable new ideas came to you and beneficially changed your experience.
Ideas not only alter the world constantly, they make it constantly.
(emphasis mine)
