In this article we will continue our discussion of the human life cycle, moving now into adulthood, parenting, and family dynamics.
Beliefs about Youth, Parents & Adulthood
“Some beliefs may work very positively for you for certain periods of your life.
Because you have not examined them, however, you may carry them long after they have served their purpose, and now they may work against you.
For example, many of the young believe at one time or another that their parents are omnipotent – a very handy belief that gives children a sense of security.
Grown into adolescent years, the same offspring are then shocked to discover their parents to be quite human and fallible, and another conviction often takes over: a belief in the inadequacy and inferiority of the older generations, and in the rigidity and callousness of those who run the world.
Many embarking upon young adulthood think that the older generations have done everything wrong.
However, this belief frees them from childish concepts in which older persons were always not only right but infallible, and it gives them the challenge to tackle personal and world problems.
For a while the new adults often feel themselves to be invincible, beyond the boundaries of creaturehood, even; this belief, again, endows them with the strength and energy they need to begin a life for themselves and to form their own mass world.
Yet in material terms they must all realize, sooner or later, not only the challenges but the other peculiar characteristics of creaturehood, in which basically no such generalized beliefs make sense.
If at the age of forty you still believe in the infallibility of your parents, then you hold that idea way beyond its advantageous state for you.
By examining your beliefs, you should discover the reasons for this belief, for it will prevent you from exerting your own independence and making your own world.
If you are fifty and are still convinced that the older generations are rigid, fast in the way of growing senile, mentally incompetent and physically deteriorating, then you are holding an old belief in the ineffectiveness of the older generations and setting up negative suggestions for yourself.
Conversely, if you are fifty and still believe that youth is the one glorious and effective part of a lifetime, you are of course doing the same thing.”1
Adulthood
“During Western years of adulthood, consciousness is focused most intently in one specific area of activity and physical manipulation.
From childhood, the mind is trained to use its argumentative, separating qualities above all others.
Creativity is allowed to flow only through certain highly limited, accepted channels.
Young people are urged to tackle life aggressively, but in the usage of the term this means competitively.
It also implies, and of course, promotes, the direction of individual consciousness in an exterior fashion only.
Not only is consciousness to be focused to the external reality, but within those limits it is still further harnessed toward certain specific goals. Other inclinations are frowned upon.
Such individuals are trained to consider any alterations of consciousness, any seemingly “passive” endeavor as dangerous to one degree or another.
An artist will be tolerated – only if his works sells well, for example, in which case it will be thought that the artist is simply trickier than most in discerning a way of making money.
The writer is put up with if books result in either fame or fortune.
The poet is scarcely tolerated, for usually his or her gifts bring neither.
The dreamer, whatever his age, job, or family background, is considered most suspect, for it seems that he doesn’t even have a craft to excuse his moral laziness.
People with such beliefs will find it most difficult to understand the creativity of their own being.”2
Denying Adulthood
“Your behavior will follow your beliefs.
If you are over forty, for instance, you may tell yourself that age is meaningless, that you enjoy much younger people, that you think young thoughts.
You will accept only those emotions that appear to be in keeping with your ideas of youth.
You become concerned with the problems of the young.
You accept what you think of as optimistic health-giving thoughts.
Underneath, however you are very much aware, as indeed you should be, of your reality in creaturehood.
Yet you firmly ignore any changes in your appearance from the time you were, say, thirty – and in so doing lose sight of your validity as a creature in space and time.
You will inhibit any thoughts of death or dying, or of old age, and so close out quite natural feelings that are meant to lead you beyond your earlier years.
You are denying the body’s corporeal existence and its focus in the time of the seasons, and cheating yourself of those natural biological, psychic, and mental motions that are meant to take you past themselves.
To pretend to ignore your age, to act young because you fear your age, is no answer.”3
Ideas of Youth and Old Age
“In this particular context, one of the problems arises out of the connotations given to the words “older” or “old.”
In western culture you believe that to be young is to be flexible, alert and aware.
To be old or older is considered a disgrace, generally speaking; rigid, out of style, and passé.
If you desperately try to remain young it is usually to hide your own beliefs about age, and to negate all of those emotions connected with it.
Whenever you refuse to accept the reality of your creaturehood, you also reject aspects of your spirit.
The body exists in the world of space and time.
The experiences you may encounter in your sixties are as necessary as those in your twenties.
Your changing image is supposed to tell you something.
When you pretend alterations do not occur you block both biological and spiritual messages.
In old age the organism is, in certain terms, preparing for a new birth.
The combined events of spirit, mind and body involve not only the passing of one season but preparation for the beginning of another.
The situation includes all of those supports necessary to carry you through, not only with acceptance but with the great aggressive drive toward new experience.
To refute your reality in time results in your being stuck in time and obsessed by it.
Accepting your integrity in time allows the body to function until its natural end, in good condition, free from those distorted, invisible concepts about age.
If you believe that youth is the ideal and struggle for it while simultaneously believing that old age must involve infirmities then you cause an unnecessary dilemma, and hasten aging according to the negative aspects of your mind.”4
Parenting
“The entity, child or adult, as you call it, is not an instrument to be played.
The appropriate teach/learning device of parent to child is the open-hearted beingness of the parent and the total acceptance of the beingness of the child.
This will encompass whatever material the child entity has brought into the life experience in this plane.
There are two things especially important in this relationship other than the basic acceptance of the child by the parent.
Firstly, the experience of whatever means the parent uses to worship and give thanksgiving to the One Infinite Creator, should if possible be shared with the child entity upon a daily basis.
Secondly, the compassion of parent to child may well be tempered by the understanding that the child entity shall learn the biases of service to others or service to self from the parental other-self.
This is the reason that some discipline is appropriate in the teach/learning.”5
Parenting and Approval beyond “The Norm”
“Each individual has its own unique abilities.
Some that involve relationships with others, you do not even have words for.
Parents, however, often half-disapprove of their children if they show unusual gifts.
They are afraid their children will not get along with others.
They are upset because the children do not fit the norm — but no child ever fits “the norm.”
Many children, for that matter, who are regarded as retarded by their teachers, are instead highly gifted.
The same also applies to disruptive children, who are overactive and put on behavioral drugs. Their rebellion is quite natural.”6
Parenting & Belief Systems
“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.”
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 existence.
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.”7
Parenting, Marriage & Social Roles
“Some of you will primarily organize your experience along definite lines.
It may be your sex role or your professional role.
You may see yourself as a mother or a father first of all, as a teacher, an editor, or as a “man’s man.”
You will, however emphasize one certain quality above all others – your athletic nature, your spiritual bent, whatever it may be.
Now such concentration is excellent if the original concept continues to expand with your experience, and of itself is not limiting to a strong degree.
You may see yourself primarily as a mother.
Initially, that may simply involve taking care of your children at home.
But if that idea of yourself remains limited then it may preclude, say, even being a wife to your husband, deny you many complementary interests, and prevent expansion of your personality in other areas.
A young mother may believe that her child is even more important than her husband, and according to the circumstances this belief may help her pay the necessary attention to the child – but if the concept is held as the child grows older, then this can also become highly restrictive.
A woman’s entire adult life can be structured according to such an idea if she does not learn to examine the contents of her mind.
A belief that has positive results for a woman of twenty will not necessarily have the same effect for a woman of forty, who, for example, may still pay far more attention to her children than her husband.
Many of your beliefs are of course cultural, but you have still accepted those that served your own purposes.
As a rule, men in your society believe themselves logical while women are considered intuitive.
Women, now trying to assert their rights, often fall into the same trap, but backwards – trying to deny what they think of as inferior intuitive elements for what they think of as superior logical ones.
Certain beliefs then will structure your lives, often for given periods. You will grow out of many of them.
When you do, the inner structuring will change, but you must not cravenly acquiesce to “leftover” beliefs once you recognize them.
Some of you believe that you have to justify your existence through your career, skills or talents.
This is because you do not trust the basic right of your being as it exists in space and time.
This same artificial need to vindicate being is present in many, and various core beliefs may be built up to hide this inner insecurity.
You may “justify your life” by biological creativity, and then latch onto your children and never want to let them go.
You may use your career instead.
But in all cases you must come to grips with such unnecessary ideas, face the reality of your creaturehood, and see that you certainly have as much of a place in the universe as a squirrel, an ant or a leaf.
You do not question their right to exist. Why question your own?”8
Family
“You Choose Your Parents.
Each of you chose your parents and environment.
Precognition also applies at your birth, when ahead of time you are quite aware on unconscious levels of those conditions that you will meet.
You have chosen them and projected them ahead of you, out into the medium of time.
Each person chooses his or her parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of characteristics, attitudes, and abilities from which to draw in physical life.
There is always a reason, and so each parent will represent to each child an unspeakable symbol, and often the two parents will represent glaring contrast and different probabilities, so that the child can compare and contrast divergent realities.”9
Telepathic Communication among Families
“Telepathic communication is constant.
This is usually at an unconscious level merely because your conscious mind is in a state of becoming.
It cannot hold all of the information you possess.
As an example, if your conscious ideas are relatively positive you will react to telepathically received information of a similar nature, even if you do so on an unconscious level.
You are also sending your own telepathic thoughts outward.
Others will react to those according to their own ideas of reality.
A family can constantly reinforce its joy, gaiety, and spontaneity by concentrating on ideas of vitality, strength and creativity; or it can let half of its energy slip away by reinforcing resentments, angers and thoughts of doubt and failure.”10
Family Dynamics
“As a man with schizophrenia can be so divided, so can a nation and a world. So can a species.
So, therefore, can a family be so divided, and one member always appear as a hero and one the villain or the demon.
You may have two children, one of whom generally speaking behaves docile, powerless, weak and insecure, and one who acts strong-willed, powerful, aggressive, dominating, arrogant and narcissistic.
Because one seems so compliant and docile and one is violent and unruly, you may never see the connections between their behaviors, thinking them so obviously different.
Yet if being “good”, polite, and compliant is not the usual state of normal children, neither is incessant violent activity.
In such cases what you usually have is a situation in which one child is acting out un-faced aggressive behavior for the whole family.
Such un-reconciled patterns of activity also mean that love is not being freely expressed.
Love is outgoing, as aggression is.
You cannot inhibit one without similarly affecting the other, so under such conditions the docile loving child is usually projecting and expressing the restrained love for the family as a whole.
Both the villain and the hero will be in trouble, however, for each are denying other legitimate aspects of their experience.”11
Family Gestalts
“Families must be considered as gestalts of psychic activity; they have a subjective identity, of which no particular member of the group may be aware.
Families have subconscious purposes, though the individual members of the family may pursue these goals without conscious awareness.
Such groups are set up ahead of time, so to speak, in between physical existences.
Oftentimes four or five individuals will set themselves a given challenge, and assign to the various members different parts to play.
Then in a physical existence the roles will be worked out.
The inner self is always aware of the hidden mechanisms of these family gestalts.
Those who have been closely bound through emotional ties often prefer to remain in closely tied or loosely tied physical relationships that continue through many lifetimes.
New relationships are always encouraged however, for you can have ingrown reincarnational “families.”
Many of these form physical organizations that are actually manifestations of inner groupings.”12
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 42.20, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=42
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
Recent Comments