Session 621

Personal Reality, Session 621

I am not minimizing the importance of the inner self.  All of its infinite resources are placed at the disposal of your conscious mind, however, and for your conscious purposes.

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.

The conscious mind was [therefore] expected to perform alone, so to speak, ignoring the highly intuitive inner information that is also available to it.  It was not supposed to be aware of such data.  Yet any individual knows quite well that intuitive hunches, inspiration, precognitive information or clairvoyant material has often risen to conscious knowledge.  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.

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.  These theories hold that the intellect and usual consciousness are far inferior to the inner “unconscious” portions of being, and that all the answers are hidden from view.  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.

Both groups ignore the miraculous unity of the psyche, the fine natural interworkings that exist between the so-called conscious mind and the so-called unconscious – the incredibly rich interaction as each gives and takes.

The “unconscious” simply contains great portions of your own experience in which you have been taught not to believe.  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 your method of assessing temporal experience according to the beliefs that it holds about the nature of reality.  It automatically causes the body to react in certain ways.  I cannot say this often enough: Your beliefs form your reality, your body and its condition, your personal relationships, your environment, and en masse your civilization and world.

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 follows your beliefs.  It is not the other way around.

If – now, a brief innocuous-enough example – you meet an individual often enough and think, “He gives me a pain in the neck”, it is surely no coincidence that you find yourself with a painful neck in future encounters with this person.  The suggestion is quite a conscious one, however, given by yourself and carried out not symbolically but most practically, most literally.  In other words, the conscious mind gives its orders and the inner self carries them out.

In this existence you are physically oriented.  Surely then the conscious physically oriented mind is the one that is meant to make deductions about the nature of physical reality.  Otherwise you would have no free will.

In Western culture since the Industrial Revolution, the idea grew that there was little connection between the objects in the world and the individual.  Now this is not a history book so I will not go into the reasons behind this idea, but will merely mention that it was an overreaction, in your terms at least, to previous religious concepts.

Before that time man did believe that he could affect matter and the environment through his thoughts.  With the Industrial Revolution, however, even the elements of nature lost their living quality in man’s eyes.  They became objects to be categorized, named, torn apart and examined.

You do not dissect a pet cat or dog, so when man began to dissect the universe in those terms he had already lost his sense of love for it.  It became soulless for him.  Only then could he examine it, you see, without qualm, and without being aware of the living voice that protested; and so in his great fascination for what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand the heredity of a flower, say, he forgot what he could [also] learn by smelling a flower, looking at it, watching it be itself.

So he examined “dead nature”.  Often he had to kill life in order, he thought, to discover its reality.

You cannot understand what makes things live when you must first rob their life.  And so when man learned to categorize, number and dissect nature, he lost its living quality and no longer felt a part of it.  To some important extent he denied his heritage, for spirit is born into nature and the soul, and for a time resides in flesh.

Man’s thoughts no longer seemed to have any effect upon nature because in his mind he saw himself apart from it.  In an ambiguous fashion, while concentrating upon nature’s exterior aspects in a very conscious manner, he still 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 became then an adversary that he must control.  Yet underneath he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because in cutting himself off from it he also cut himself off from using many of his own abilities.

It was at this point that the nature of the conscious mind itself became so misunderstood, and those unrecognized or denied powers were assigned to unconscious portions of the self by ensuing schools of psychology.  Very natural functions of the conscious mind, therefore, were assigned to the “underground” and cut off from normal use.

Because the conscious mind has been so stressed (while stripped of many of its characteristics), there is now an overreaction occurring in which normal consciousness is being put down, colloquially speaking.

Emotion and imagination are being considered as far superior.  The displaced powers of consciousness are still being assigned to the unconscious, and great efforts are being made to reach what seem to be normally inaccessible areas of awareness.  To this end drugs are utilized, cults set up, and there are methods and training manuals galore.  Yet there is nothing basically inaccessible about “inner knowledge or experience”.  It can all be quite conscious, and utilized to enrich the reality that you know.  The conscious mind is not some prodigal child or poor relative of the self.  It can quite freely focus into inner reality when you understand that it can.  You, again, have a conscious mind.  You can change the focus of your own consciousness.

There have been tyrannies propagated for various reasons by the race of man upon itself.  One of the greatest, however, is the idea that the conscious mind does not have any touch with the fountains of your own being, that it is divorced from nature, and that the individual is therefore at the mercy of unconscious drives over which he has no control.

Man therefore feels himself powerless.  If the purpose of civilization is to enable the individual to live in peace, joy, security and abundance, then that idea has served him poorly.

When a man or a woman feels no connection between personal reality and experience and the surrounding world, then he [or she] loses even an animal’s sense of pure competence and belonging.  Your beliefs, once more, form your reality, shaping your life and all of its conditions.

All of the powers of your inner self are set into activation as a result of your conscious beliefs.  You have lost a sense of responsibility for your conscious thought because you have been taught that it is not what forms your life.  You have been told that regardless of your beliefs you are terrorized by unconscious conditioning.

And as long as you hold that conscious belief you will experience it as reality.

Some of your beliefs originated in your childhood, but you are not at their mercy unless you believe that you are.  Because your imagination follows your beliefs, you can find yourself in a vicious circle in which you constantly paint pictures in your mind that reinforce “negative” aspects in your life.

The imaginative events generate appropriate emotions, which automatically bring about hormonal changes in your body or affect your behavior with others, or cause you to interpret events always in the light of your beliefs.  And so daily experience will seem to justify what you believe more and more.

The only way out of it is to become aware of our 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.

As mentioned (in the 614^th session in Chapter Two), the first important step is to realize that your beliefs about reality are just that – beliefs about reality and not necessarily attributes of reality.  You must make a clear distinction between you and your beliefs.  You must then realize that your beliefs are physically materialized.  What you believe to be true in your experience is true.  To change the physical effect you must change the original belief – while being quite aware that for a time physical materializations of the old beliefs may still hold.

If you completely understand what I am saying however, your new beliefs will – and quickly – begin to show themselves in your experience.  But you must not be concerned for their emergence, for this brings up the fear that new ideas will not materialize, and so this negates your purpose.

I mentioned (in the 619^th session) 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 the game.

You are doing the same thing now constantly and automatically with whatever beliefs you have, and they are being as constantly and automatically translated.  It is the separation of self from beliefs that is so important initially, however.

You are not to hammer at yourself consciously.  Imagination and emotion are your great allies.  Your conscious direction will automatically bring them into play.  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.

Much has been written saying that if imagination and willpower are in conflict, imagination will win.  Now I tell you, if you examine yourself you will find that imagination and willpower are never in conflict.  Your beliefs may conflict, but your imagination will always follow your willpower and your conscious thoughts and beliefs.

If this is not apparent to you, then it is because you have not as yet completely examined your beliefs.  Let us take a simple example: You are overweight.  You have tried diets to no avail.  You tell yourself that you want to lose weight.  You follow what I have said so far.  You change the belief.  You say, “Because I believe I am overweight, I am, so I will think of myself at my ideal weight.”

But you find that you still overeat.  In your mind’s eye you still see yourself as overweight, imagine the goodies and snacks, and in your terms “give in” to your imagination – and you think that willpower is useless and conscious thought powerless.

But pretend that you go beyond this point.  In sheer desperation you say, “All right, I will examine my beliefs further!”  Now this is a hypothetical case so you may find one of innumerable beliefs.  You may, for instance, find that you believe you are not worthy, and hence should not look attractive.  Or that health means physical weight and it is dangerous to be slim.

So you may find that you feel – and believe that you are – so vulnerable that you need the weight so people will think twice before they shove you around.  In all of these cases the ideas will be conscious.  You have entertained them often and your imagination and emotions are in league with them, and not in conflict.

Now: You may be poor.  Following my suggestions, you may try to alter the belief and say, “My wants are taken care of and I have great abundance.”  Yet you may still find yourself unable to meet your bills.

Imaginatively you may see the next bill coming, with you unable to pay it.  “I will have enough money,” you say.  “This is my new belief.”  But nothing changes so you think, “My conscious thoughts mean nothing.”  Yet upon examination of your beliefs you may find a deep conviction of your own unworthiness.

You may find yourself thinking, “I am no one to begin with,” or “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, or, “The world is against me”, or, “Money is wrong.  People who have it are not spiritual.”  You may discover, again, one of numerous beliefs that all lead to the fact that you do not want to have money or are afraid of it.  In any case your imagination and your beliefs go hand in hand.

You may be trying to remember your dreams – another example.  You may give yourself appropriate suggestions each night, only to awaken again with no memory of them.  You may say, “Consciously I want to remember my dreams, but my suggestions do not work.  Therefore what I want on a conscious level has little significance.”

Yet if you examine your beliefs more carefully you will find one of many possible beliefs, such as, “I’m afraid to remember my dreams,” or, “My dreams are always unpleasant,” or, “I’m afraid to know what I dream about,” or, “I want to remember my dreams but – they may tell me more than I want to know!”

In this case also your reality colors your beliefs, and your experience is a direct result of your conscious attitudes.  By such attitudes as these just mentioned you put clamps upon your inner self, purposely hamper your experience, and reinforce beliefs in the negative aspects of your being.

Only by examining these ideas of your own can you learn where you stand with yourself.  Now I do not mean to stress the negative by any means, so I suggest that you look to those areas of your life in which you are pleased and have done well.  See how emotionally and imaginatively you personally reinforced those beliefs and brought them to physical fruition – realize how naturally and automatically the results appeared.  Catch hold of those feelings of accomplishment and understand that you can use the same methods in other areas.