“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(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.

Stop indulging A) in self-pity. B) Stop indulging in bitter and negative projections into the future. Stop seeing yourself as helpless. Stop reminding yourself of how bitter your present experience is. Stop telling yourself that you are powerless and that there is nothing you can do to change your mood. Stop luxuriating in negative thoughts and emotions. You do this by stopping now. Each time you find yourself thinking, how can I bear this; instead you say, many people have many more severe problems than I.

You do not remind yourself and then allow a thousand negative thoughts in between.

You want your obsession. Then allow her her individuality as a person and respect her feeling. You have no right to expect to change someone else’s attitudes, to treat them as an object, or to want them despite their own wishes. Your whole thoughts at this point are negative. You must allow the woman a freedom in your thoughts and allow yourself freedom in your thoughts.

You did realize it. Now, these are truths that you do not face and fiction you do not tell yourself. You must learn to accept yourself and your situation as it is. The two of you are miserable together because the two of you created a miserable reality. When you learn to create a positive reality for yourself then you will be able to help someone else create one.

Very little. Now, give yourself some freedom from negative thoughts and give her freedom in your mind. Concentrate upon what you have that is positive. Now, this includes your health, your life and your livelihood. Enjoy the sensation of being alive. Learn again to re-educate yourself so that you understand what subjective happiness is and then see how you feel and what your problem is.