“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

When you have strong aggressive feelings admit them as being legitimate feelings and accept them as legitimate on their level. Do not deny them. Now, when you accept them and feel them, the very acceptance and acknowledgment gives you some relief and the feelings, to some extent, already begin to dissipate. And when you refuse to accept them, they build up and the longer you refuse to acknowledge them they continue to build up until they have an explosive charge. If normal aggressive feelings are accepted when they are felt they will not give you trouble, they will dissipate. Physical activity at the time is good. Say what is on your mind honestly. If this is done then you will not feel the need to over exaggerate as you express these feelings. Do you follow me?

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 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.