Emotions Lead To…

Seth Quote by Jane Roberts
Excerpt from The Nature Of Personal Reality

You give no conscious thought to the coming and going of cells within your organs. Left alone, your thoughts will come and go through your belief systems just as naturally, and ideally, they will balance out, maintaining their own health and directing your body so that its innate therapies take place.

Your systems of belief will of course attract certain kinds of thoughts, with their trails of emotional experience. A steady barrage of hateful, revengeful thoughts should actually lead you to look for the beliefs from which they are gaining their strength.

You cannot do this by ignoring the validity of the thoughts as your experience, however, by trying to shove them under the rug of a superficial optimism. Such habitual, unhappy thoughts will bring about the same kind of physical experience, but it is your own system of beliefs that you must examine.

The “negative” subjective and objective events that you meet are meant to make you examine the contents of your own conscious mind. In their way the hateful or revengeful thoughts are natural therapeutic devices, for if you follow them, accepting them with their own validity as feelings, they will automatically lead you beyond themselves; they will change into other feelings, carrying you from hatred into what may seem to be the quicksands of fear, which is always behind hatred.

By going along with feelings you unify your emotional, mental and bodily state. When you try to fight or deny them, you divorce yourself from the reality of your being. Dealing with thoughts and feelings as just directed at least roots you firmly in the integrity of your present experience, and allows its innate motion and natural creativity to thrust toward a therapeutic solution.

When you refute such emotions or become terrified of them, you impede the flow of feeling from one moment to the other. You set up dams. Any emotion will change into another if you experience it honestly. Otherwise you clog the natural movement of your entire system.

Fear, faced and felt with its bodily sensations and the thoughts that go along with it, will automatically bring about its own state of resolution. The conscious system of beliefs behind the impediment will be illuminated, and you will realize that you feel a certain way because you believe an idea that causes and justifies such a reaction.

If you habitually deny the expression of any emotions, to that degree you become alienated not only from your body but from your conscious ideas. You will bury certain thoughts and put up biological armor to pre­vent you from physically feeling their effects upon your body. In each case the answer lies in your personal system of beliefs, in those strong concepts you hold on an intimate level that brought about the inhibitions to begin with.

If you find yourself running around in a spiritual frenzy, trying to repress every negative idea that comes into your head, then ask yourself why you believe so in the great destructive power of your slightest “negative” thought.

The body and mind together do present a united, self-regulating, healing, self-clearing system. Within it each problem contains its own solution if it is honestly faced. Each symptom, mental or physical, is a clue to the resolution of the conflict behind it, and contains within it the seeds of its own healing.

It is true that habitual thoughts of love, optimism and self-acceptance are better for you than their opposites; but again, your beliefs about yourself will automatically attract thoughts that are consistent with your ideas. There is as much natural aggressiveness in love as there is in hate. Hate is a distortion of such a normal force, the result of your beliefs… natural aggression is cleansing and highly creative - the thrust behind all emotions.

Write down your beliefs in a variety of areas, and you will find that you believe different things at different times. Often there will be contradictions readily apparent. These represent opposing beliefs that regulate your emotions, your bodily condition and your physical experience. Examine the conflicts.

Invisible beliefs will appear that unite those seemingly diverse attitudes. Invisible beliefs are simply those of which you are fully aware but prefer to ignore, because they represent areas of strife which you have not been willing to handle thus far. They are quite available once you are determined to examine the complete contents of your conscious mind. If this strikes you as too intellectual a method, then you can also work backward from your emotions to your beliefs…

You must accept the validity of your feelings while realizing that they are about certain issues or conditions, and are not necessarily factual statements of your reality. “I feel that I am a poor mother,” or, “I feel that I am a failure.” These are emotional statements and should be accepted as such. You are to understand, however, that while the feelings have their own integrity as emotions, they may not be statements of fact. You might be an excellent mother while feeling that you are very inadequate. You may be most successful in reaching your goals while still thinking yourself a failure...

A series of self-revelations will inevitably result, each leading you to further creative psychological activity. At each stage you will be closer to the reality of your experience than you have ever been.

The conscious mind will benefit greatly… It will no longer fear the emotions, or the body, as threatening or unpredictable, but sense the greater unity in which it is involved. The emotions will not feel like stepchildren, with only the best-dressed being admitted. They will not need to cry out for expression, for they will be fully admitted as members of the family of the self.

In [some] cases you are afraid of your emotions. You think their powers so strong that all reason can be drowned within them. No matter how open it may seem that you are, you will nevertheless accept certain emotions that you think of as safe, and ignore others, or stop them at particular points, because you are afraid of following them further.

When you allow your emotions their natural spontaneous flow they will never engulf you, and always return you refreshed to “logical” conscious-mind thought… You have been given an opportunity to study life and to experience it more fully than you have before in this existence. Its intensity and brilliance, its contrasts and similarities, its joys and its sorrows, are here for you to perceive… Man forgot the teaching and healing elements, and concentrated instead upon the unpleasant experience itself… you cannot fall out of a state of grace. Each of you must intellectually and emotionally accept it, however.