“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause at 10:20.) While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate areas of private and mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for effective solutions. “You get what you concentrate upon.”¹ Your mental images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but you must understand the ways in which your mass communication systems amplify both the “positive and the negative” issues.

Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say: “Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such a disease.”

When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of generalized fear, he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against himself. Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations. In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.

If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality. Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.

Involved in the arguments are the leading cancer investigative organizations in the country. For example: Scientific advisers to the government’s National Cancer Institute, which is conducting elaborate studies of many thousands of women of varying ages, have called for a halt to the routine screening of younger women. These scientists are on record as stating that such X-raying may cause more breast cancer than it cures. Many millions of dollars, and much time and effort, have been and are being given to such research programs. It will be difficult to alter those studies because of entrenched belief systems. Even the economic factors become important: Beside the great sums involved in the “official” programs, for instance, many private radiologists have also found mammography screening to be quite profitable.