How to Rearrange Your Beliefs As If They Were Furniture

HJ: Fundamental to the truth that we create our own reality is the nature of belief and how it dictates and underlies our perceptions.  Belief is one of the most crucial aspects of the self to understand on the path to higher spiritual awareness.  To put it simply, our beliefs dictate what we experience in life and so if one desires to change their experience of life, one must first change their belief structure to more closely suit the reality they wish to create.  Therefore, the ability it identify and alter ones beliefs is a coveted ability whose transformative power is frequently overlooked.

Most people are not even aware of their belief structures, let alone readily trying to fundamentally alter them.  Furthermore, if something in their life does not match the reality they desire to create, they attempt to remedy the situation by manipulating people, things and events outside themselves.  This will only lead to frustration and does not deal with the root of the issue, which is an unconscious, counterproductive belief structure.  One must always remember all change originates from within and so if one seeks to change an aspect of their life experience, they must only go within.  Once the change is made in the conscious and subconscious mind, whatever that may be, the outer world will eventually follow suit after a period of adjusting to the new inner changes.

– Truth

Seth via Jane Roberts | Seth Learning Center

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Separate portions of your mind can contain such chambers of inactive material. This information will not be a part of the organized structure of your usual thoughts; though the data is consciously available you can be relatively blind to it.

Usually when you look into your conscious mind you do so for a particular reason, to find some information. But if you have schooled yourself to believe that such data is not consciously available, then it will not occur to you to find it in your conscious mind. If furthermore your conscious data is strongly organized about a core belief, then this will automatically make you blind to experience that is not connected with it.

A core belief is invisible only when you think of it as a fact of life, and not as a belief about life; only when you identify with it so completely that you automatically focus your perceptions along that specific line.

For example, here is a seemingly very innocent core belief. ‘I am a responsible parent.’

Now on the surface there is nothing wrong with that belief. If you hold to it and do not examine it, however, you may find that the word ‘responsible’ is quite loaded, and collects other ideas that are equally unexamined by you. What is your idea of being responsible? According to your answer you can discover whether the core belief works to your advantage or not.

If responsible means, ‘I must be a parent twenty-four hours a day to the exclusion of everything else,’ then you may be in difficulty, for that core belief might prevent you from using other abilities that exist quite apart from your parenthood.

You may begin to perceive all physical data through the eyes of that core belief alone. You will not look out upon physical reality with the wonder of a child any more, or with the unstructured curiosity of an individual, but always through parental eyes. Thus you will close yourself off from much of physical experience.

Now telepathically you will also attract unconscious data that fits into this rigid pattern, according to the strength and stubbornness of this idea and whether or not you are willing to deal with it. You may narrow your life still further, all information of any kind finally becoming relatively invisible to you unless it touches upon your parental reality.

Now: The core belief just given is of one kind.

You hold some basic assumptions that are also core beliefs. To you they seem to be definitions. They are so a part of you that you take them for granted. Your idea of time is one.

You may enjoy manipulating thoughts of time in your mind. You may find yourself thinking that time is basically different from your experience of it, but fundamentally you believe that you exist in the hours and the years, that the weeks come at you one at a time, that you are caught in the onrush of the seasons.

Naturally your physical experience reinforces this belief. You structure your perception, therefore, in terms of the lapses that seem to happen between events. This in itself forces you to concentrate your attention in one direction only, and discourages you from perceiving the events in your life in other fashions.

You may occasionally employ the association of ideas, one thought leading easily to another. When you do this you often perceive new insights. As the events fall apart from time continuity in your mind they seem to take on fresh vitality. You have unstructured them, you see, from the usual organization.

As you apprehend them through association you come quite close to examining the contents of your mind in a free fashion. But if you drop the time concept and then view the conscious content of your mind through other core ideas, you are still structuring. I am not saying that you should never organize those contents. I am saying that you must become aware of your own structures. Build them up or tear them down, but do not allow yourself to become blind to the furniture of your own mind.

You can stub your toe as easily on a misplaced idea as you can upon an old chair. It will help you, in fact, if you think of your own beliefs as furniture that can be rearranged, changed, renewed, completely discarded or replaced. Your ideas are yours. They should not control you. It is up to you to accept those that you choose to accept.

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Imagine yourself then rearranging this furniture. Images of particular pieces will come clearly to you. Ask yourself what ideas these pieces represent. See how well the tables fit together. Open up the drawers inside.

There will be no mystery. You know what your own beliefs are. You will see the groupings, but it is up to you to look inside your own mind and to use the images in your own way. Throw out ideas that do not suit you. If you read this, find such an idea in yourself and then say, ‘I cannot throw this idea away,’ then you must realize that your inner remark is in itself a belief. You can indeed throw the idea away, the second one, as easily as the first.

You are not powerless before ideas. Using this analogy, you will certainly find some furniture that you did not expect. Do not simply look in the center of your inner room of consciousness; and make sure that you are on guard against the certain invisibility that was mentioned earlier (in this chapter), where an idea, quite available, appears to be a part of reality instead.

The structuring of beliefs is done in a highly characteristic yet individual manner, so you will find patterns that exist between various groupings, and one can lead you to another.

The idea of being the responsible parent, for example, may lead quite easily to other psychic structures involving responsibility, so that data is accepted on its own value. You may even think that it is wrong to view any situation except through your parental status.

The belief in guilt therefore would be a cementing structure that would hold together other similar core beliefs, and add to their strength. You must understand that these are not simply dead ideas, like debris, within your mind. They are psychic matter. In a sense then they are alive. They group themselves like cells, protecting their own validity and identity.

Session 618, Page 51