“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.

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.

As you all know, and this is not new, your pitiful body changes with each thought that you have and with each emotion. If you luxuriate in self-pity and feelings of chaos then you have yourselves to blame. There is no other place where you can lay the blame and it is up to you, to each of you individually, to watch the nature of your thoughts for with your thoughts you created the body that you have, the individual realities that you know. You create your little toe and your elbow and the pupil of your eye and your legs. When you allow your thoughts to run riot then your life runs riot. Now, there is no contradiction here with what I have said about spontaneity. When you have allowed negative habits, however, to take over, then somewhere you must draw the line for the negative habits knock away the discipline. The negative habits knock away even spontaneity for all thoughts of good will and health and vitality disappear beneath these thoughts that you are handing yourself every day like poison upon the spoon, whether the spoon be wooden or tarnished or silver. Now, this applies to everyone in the room to some extent or another, for there is no one that cannot stand improvement and this includes our friend Ruburt, but you do not understand yourselves or know yourselves. If you do not know your own thoughts, and if you cannot change them when you want to, you are not at the mercy of your thoughts.

The point I wanted to make is this—each thought is an electromagnetic reality on its own, a unique electromagnetic reality. Now, your thoughts create patterns in dimensions that you do not perceive. You become habitually able to think in certain patterns more than other patterns. Now, when you allow negative thoughts to predominate in your conscious mind you then become more open to the negative thoughts of others. You are given a natural protection but you weaken this protection when your conscious thoughts are negative. This not only happens in the waking state, but you also become more open in the dreaming state to telepathic communications from others of a negative pattern. It is you who open these channels through your thoughts, a sort of psychic contagion in which you are the agent. You not only attract negative conditions therefore in the physical world that you know, but you open yourselves up to these in the dream reality.

Now, you can change this by changing the pattern of your thoughts. Not only do you attract like patterns when you are awake, but when you are asleep, so a vicious, vicious pattern is set up when you are negative. Your negative dreams, therefore, reinforce the waking pattern. Now, you will pick up with your physical senses precisely what you are interested in. If you are interested in disasters and looking for them, then telepathically you will also pick up disasters so that your dreams always seem negative and filled with foreboding. If, however, your conscious thought patterns are positive, then your dream patterns will also be the same.

Those of you who are negative, therefore, will find this reflected not only in your waking life but in your dreams.

Now the change can be miraculous when you change your conscious thought patterns. You can watch the changes happen. It sounds simple and it is simple if you apply it, but it is you who has to know the nature of your own thoughts.

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.

(To Sue:) Do you have a question, our lady on the blue couch with the brown pigtails? I will let you all take a break, but I want you to realize that these techniques are to be used. This is not theory to be listened to or read and forgotten. It is to be put into practice or it is of no use. Knowledge that is not applied to people is not knowledge.

([Theodore:] “But the expressions need not necessarily be to the party you are concerned about.”)

It need not be, but it may be. If someone annoys you, you should admit honestly that they annoy you. That is the first point. You need not tell the other person or you may, but if you refuse to ignore the feeling, the feeling builds up until someday the poor man makes a simple, innocent mood [sic], you will beat him over the head, or worse, develop a knock in your knee because you want to hit him over the head and do not dare to do so.

(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.

When you love life very deeply then it is very easy to despair, and when you compare ideal human relations to the relations that exist in the world as it is, it is very easy to despair; but if you give in to despair then you cannot see the beauty that does exist for the despair will eat it through like lye; and so hold on to the beauty and guard it and the vitality of your thoughts and emotions and your natural vitality as you would your life, for it is your life. Peace—now you may all take a break.

(After break. To Florence.) And I will look in on you about Virginia Beach time. If you were expressing yourself fully on certain issues you would not have a cold, and if you were using all of the insights that you should have gathered in class, you would not have a cold. If you were allowing full expression of your inner ideas outward along certain lines having to do with your oldest son, you would not have a cold. It is easier, however, to use honey and vinegar; but using honey and vinegar you simply get rid of the cold and do not find out why you have it. You do not learn something about yourself that you should know and so when the cough is gone, when the issue comes up again, you get a different ailment and so you find a different remedy. Honey and vinegar are cheap; self-knowledge is dear but far more valuable. Such inner remedies and such real remedies do not come in packages and you cannot pick them up at the supermarket, and they are not herbs to be eaten for breakfast though these will serve as an in-between measure and there is nothing wrong with in-between measures. But if you want to get at the real knowledge of yourself and at the real reason for symptoms, then there are ways of doing so and I have given them to you. They are not meant to be bitter as vinegar.

Give yourself the suggestion that you will remember, but when you do this, do it with conviction. Not, I will try to remember, but that I will be alert to what happens to me in my dream state and I will remember.

Now, I bid you all a fond good evening and I wish you a happy vacation from classes, but I will make up for lost time and I would like to see a smile on your kisser for a change. The soul that does not smile is a dreary thing indeed.

([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.”)

([Brad:] “But not necessarily her.”)