“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

There is a difference between this, you see, which is a healthy acknowledgment of feeling and an indulgence, exaggeration of feeling that dulls you to everything else. Do you see the distinction? Do not, therefore, be afraid of emotional feelings, accept them. They are healthy and spontaneous. It is only when you refuse to accept them that they build up charges so that if you have been in the habit of refusing to accept them there may be charges that have been built up. If so, in your first attempt to get along with the expression of emotion you may find some exaggeration. If so, physical activity is a good way to work this off, if only pounding the bed. Do not put your hand through walls, it is bad on the wall and bad on the hand. Even your astral knuckles may hurt.