“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am glad to see so many friends here this evening and as usual, I have a message for you and, as usual, I want you to do something. I want you to watch your own conscious thoughts. You let them escape you half the time. You do not realize what you are thinking. Now, you blame many of your difficulties upon subconscious reaction, and you think particularly in your weak moments that you have no control. You let the thoughts of your mind chatter on, but you are not aware of what you are thinking. You do not stop and check your own thoughts. You think, for example, I feel poorly, or this hurts, or you think this is a cruddy world I am in sometimes.

As I have told you often, your body reacts to your thoughts. Now, it does no good to take ten minutes a day and give yourself good suggestions and say, “I am brave, I am strong, I am healthy and young and rich” and spend the rest of the time saying to yourself, “I am poor, I am getting old, I feel sore, or it is a cruddy world.” Therefore, often you allow these thoughts to take all of your conscious attention.

You are hypnotizing yourself. You would not think of going to a hypnotist and having him tell you that you are getting sicker by the moment or the world was getting cruddier by the moment or that your arm or foot or head or toe or ear would hurt more and more with each breath that you took. You would have the man up to be hung and think such an affair an evil thing indeed, and yet you do this to yourselves often and then you say with all blind innocence, why does this come about, why am I sick or why am I sore or why am I caught in this cruddy universe and yet you do not change your own thought. You use suggestion in the same way that you read a paragraph from a book that you think you should read perhaps for five minutes, but then you allow your (words lost)to take over completely and it seems to you that you have no control.

Now you are not using the control that you have. None of you are helpless to change events, to change your health or your reality at this moment. No one is responsible for your own conscious thought but yourself. Now, you may have built up poor habits of thought, but you can recognize this and change them. Every time you say, I am helpless, and I am slipping into chaos, whether you get laughs or not, or whether you say it humorously or not, you are indeed pushing yourself further into the chaos you are creating with every breath you take because you make no effort to change the nature of your thoughts and this is what you must do, exert your own control.

A negative thought alone would be followed by a more positive one. Remember what you were saying earlier about cycles. Thought patterns and emotional patterns, left alone, would change one into the other as stormy weather changes into sunny. It is only when strong negative patterns are allowed to flow unrestrained and indulged in so that they become a barrier holding back positive thoughts that you run into difficulty. You get into a habit and you do not realize that you have done so, where predominately your thoughts about yourselves and others are all negative with very few positive ones in between and then the positive ones have no chance to grow. This is where the difficulty comes in. I am not telling you to be so frightened of a negative thought that you want to run into a corner or hide under the bed or say “Oh, this is a negative thought, I must change it at once” and half-terrify yourselves to death. I am telling you that when you indulge in such thoughts for a period of time so that they become habitual then you must change them and no one can do this but yourself. There is no one else that has control over your own thought patterns and you would be very upset, indeed, if anyone else did.

A problem need not be negative. A problem is a challenge. It is only negative when you look at it in that aspect. A problem is usually the opportunity for change, growth and development. Now, your chatter was much more bubbling than mine. 1 want to make sure the bubbling quality continues, however, and that is why I am speaking along these terms tonight.

(To Ned.) I am now speaking to someone who is directly behind me, but I have eyes in the back of Ruburt’s head. Now, an overindulgence in negative emotions is worse than an overindulgence in negative thoughts. You have a love of nature and a love of existence that you can suffocate with an overindulgence upon negative emotions.

(To Sue.) You and this friend of yours over here, I am going to take the two of you together in the dream state and take you on some journeys that will make your head spin and your hearts sing, and I want Ruburt to see these written down, too. We start this evening. There will be a series of three episodes.

([Brad:] “I have followed what you have said to a great extent, but right now I am letting my emotions rule me to a great extent because all the logic in the world hasn’t done me a bit of good. I want Margo back.”)