“Look around 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.
Your conscious beliefs direct the functioning of your body. It is not the other way around.
...You must be aware of the contents of your own reasoning mind. Find the ambiguities. Regardless of the nature of your beliefs they are indeed made flesh and material. The miracle of your being cannot escape itself. Your thoughts blossom into events. If you think the world is evil, you will meet with events that seem evil. There are no accidents in cosmic terms, or in terms of the world as you know it. Your beliefs grow as surely in time and space as flowers do. When you realize this you can even feel their growing.
...Remember, even false beliefs will seem to be justified in terms of physical data, since your experience in the outside world is the materialization of those beliefs. So you must work with the raw material of your ideas, even while your sense data may tell you that a given belief is obviously a truth. To change your experience or any portion of it, then you must change your ideas. Since you have been forming your own reality all along, the results will follow naturally.
You are not your ideas, nor even your thoughts. You are the self who experiences them.
...If you believe that you are at the mercy of physical events, you entertain a false belief. If you feel that your present experience was set in circumstances beyond your control, you entertain a false belief.
If you find yourself concentrating upon either hatred or evil you are creating it. If you are ill you may find yourself dwelling upon the misery of your condition, and bitterly envying those who are healthy, bemoaning your state — and therefore perpetuating it through your thoughts.
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. Only love of peace will bring about those conditions.
...If you are sick, for example, there is a reason. To recover thoroughly without taking on new symptoms, you must discover the reason. You may dislike your illness, but it is a course you have decided upon. While you are convinced that the course is necessary you will keep the symptoms.
The beliefs of course will be accepted by you not as beliefs, but as reality. 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.
...Ideas have an electromagnetic reality. Beliefs are strong ideas about the nature of reality. Ideas generate emotion. Like attracts like, so similar ideas group about each other and you accept those that fit in with your particular “system“ of ideas.
...Once more, if you become aware of your own conscious thoughts, these themselves will give you clues for they clearly speak your beliefs. If, for example, you have scarcely enough money on which to live, and you examine your thoughts, you may find yourself constantly thinking, “I can never pay this bill, I never have any luck, I’ll always be poor.“ Or you will find yourself envying those who have more, degrading the value of money perhaps, and saying that those who have it are unhappy, or at best spiritually poor.
When you find these thoughts in yourself you may say, and rather indignantly: “But those things are all true. I am poor. I cannot meet my bills,” and so forth. In so doing, you see, you except your belief about reality as a characteristic of reality itself, and so the belief is transparent or invisible to you. But it causes your physical experience.
You must change the belief.”
— Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality, pg. 24-39.
