“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.

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 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.

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.