Session 619

Personal Reality, Session 619

Imagination also plays an important part in your subjective life, as it gives mobility to your beliefs.  It is one of the motivating agencies that helps transform your beliefs into physical experience.  It is vital therefore that you understand the interrelationship between ideas and imagination.  In order to dislodge unsuitable beliefs and establish new ones, you must learn to use your imagination to move concepts in and out of your mind.  The proper use of imagination can then propel ideas in the directions you desire.

Chapter 4: Your Imagination And Your Beliefs, And A Few Words About The Origin Of Your Beliefs

In physical life, your conscious mind is largely dependent upon the workings of your physical brain.  You have a conscious mind whether you are in flesh or out of it, but when you are physically oriented, then it is connected to the physical brain.

The brain to some extent keeps the mind to a three-dimensional focus.  It orients you toward the environment in which you must operate, and it is because of the mind’s allegiance with the temporal brain that you perceive, for example, time as a series of moments.

The brain channels the information that the mind receives to your physical structure, so that your experience is physically sifted and automatically translated into terms that the organism can understand.  Because of this, physically speaking and in life as you think of it, the mind is to a large extent dependent upon the brain’s growth and activity.  There is some information necessary to physical survival that must be taught and handed down from parent to child.  There are basic assumptions of a general nature with which you are born, but because the specific conditions of your environment are so various, these must be implemented.  So it is necessary that the child accept beliefs from its parents.

These will reinforce the family group when the child most needs protection.  This acquiescence to belief, then, is important in the early stages as infant develops into child.  This sharing of mutual ideas not only protects the new offspring from dangers obvious to the parents; it also serves as a framework within which the child can grow.

This provides leeway until the conscious mind is able to reason for itself and provide its own value judgments.  Later I will discuss greater aspects of the origin of ideas, but for now we will simply speak in terms of this life, the one you know.

The beliefs that you receive, therefore, are your parents’ conceptions of the nature of reality.  They are given to you through example, verbal communication, and constant telepathic reinforcement.  You receive ideas about the world in general and your relationship to it; and from your parents you are also given concepts of what you are.  You pick up their ideas of your own reality.

Underneath all of this, you carry indelibly within you your own knowledge of your identity, meaning and purpose, but in the early stages of development great care is taken to see that you relate in physical terms.  These are directional beliefs that you receive from your parents, orienting you in ways that they feel are safe.  Cushioned with these beliefs the child can be safe and satisfy its own curiosity, develop its abilities, and throw its full energy in clearly stated areas of activity.

So it is quite necessary that an acquiescence to belief does exist, particularly in early life.  There is no reason, though, for an individual to be bound by childhood beliefs or experience.  The nature of some such beliefs is that while seemingly obvious ones are recognized as harmful or foolish, others connected to them may not be so easily understood.

For example: It may seem silly to you that you ever believed in, say, original sin.  It may not be so obvious that many of your present actions are caused by a belief in guilt.  We will have much to say about the ways in which your beliefs can be connected, simply because you are not used to examining them.

You may say, “I am overweight because I feel guilty about something in the past”.  You may then try to discover what the charged event was, but in such a case your trouble is a belief in guilt itself.

You do not have to carry such a belief.  I am well aware that strong elements of your civilization are built upon ideas of guilt and punishment.  Many of you are afraid that without a feeling of guilt there would be no inner discipline, and the world would run wild.  It is running quite wild now – not despite your ideas of guilt and punishment, but largely because of them.  But we will have more to say about that later in the book.

The early ideas given to you by your parents, then, structure your learning experiences themselves.  They set the safe boundaries within which you can operate in early years.  Quite without your conscious knowing – because your mind, connected with its brain, is not that developed – your imagination is set along certain roads.

Largely, but not completely, your imagination follows your beliefs, as do your emotions.  To some extent there are certain general patterns.  A child will cry when it is hurt.  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.

From the earliest stages the child automatically compares its interpretation of reality with its parents’.  Since the parents are bigger and stronger and fulfill so many of its needs, it will attempt to bring its experience into line with their expectations and beliefs.  While it is generally quite natural for a child to cry or feel “badly” when hurt, this inclination can be carried through belief to such an extent that prolonged feelings of desolation are adopted as definite behavior patterns.

Behind this would be the belief that any hurt was inherently a disaster.  Such a belief could originate from an overanxious mother, for instance.  If such a mother’s imagination followed her belief – as of course it would – then she would immediately perceive a great potential danger to her child in the smallest threat.  Both through the mother’s actions, and telepathically, the child would receive such a message and react according to those understood beliefs.

Many such beliefs lie quite within the conscious mind.  The grown adult, not used to examining his or her own beliefs, however, may be quite unaware of harboring such an idea.  The idea itself is not buried or unconscious.  It is simply unexamined.

So one of the the most hampering beliefs of all, as earlier mentioned (in the 614^th session in Chapter Two, for instance), is the idea that the clues to current behavior are buried and usually inaccessible.  This belief itself closes to you the contents of your own conscious mind and prevents you from looking there for the answers that are available.

…  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.

…  Your beliefs always change to some extent.  As an adult you perform many activities that you believed you could not as a child.  For instance: You may at [the age of] three have believed it was dangerous to cross a street.  By thirty, hopefully, you have dismissed such a belief, though it fit in very well and was necessary to you in your childhood.  If your mother reinforced this belief telepathically and verbally through dire pictures of the potential danger involved in street crossing, however, then you would also carry within you that emotional fear, and perhaps entertain imaginative considerations of possible accident.

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.  One particular method is three-pronged.  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.

You realize that ideas are not stationary.  Emotions and imagination move them in one direction or the other, reinforce them or negate them.

Quite deliberately you use your conscious mind playfully, creating a game as children do, in which for a time you completely ignore what seems to be in physical terms and “pretend” that what you really want is real.

If you are poor, you purposely pretend that you have all you need financially.  Imagine how you will spend your money.  If you are ill, imagine playfully that you are cured.  See yourself doing what you would do.  If you cannot communicate with others, imagine yourself doing so easily.  If you feel your days dark and pointless, then imagine them filled and joyful.

Now this may sound impractical, yet in your daily life you use your imagination and your emotions often at the service of far less worthy beliefs; and the results are quite clear – and let me add, unfortunately practical.

As it took a while for the unsatisfactory beliefs to become materialized, so it may be a time before you see physical results; but the ideas will take growth and change your experience as certainly as the old ones did.  The process of imagining will also bring you face to face with other subsidiary ideas that may momentarily bring you up short.  You may see where you held two quite conflicting ideas simultaneously, and with equal vigor.  In such a case, you stalemated yourself.

You may believe that you have a right to health, and yet with equal intensity believe that the human condition is by nature tainted.  So you will try to be healthy and not healthy at the same time, or successful and not successful, according to your individual system of beliefs – for later in the book you will see how your beliefs will generally fall into a system of related ideas.