“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience. They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences. They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes have upon daily events. This is a natural learning process. If they create “bogeymen,” then they can cause them to disappear also. If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it is their own creation. This learning process is nipped in the bud, however. By the time you are adults, it certainly seems that you are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of your lives.³

Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones. The child carries with him [or her] the impetus and supporting energy provided him at birth from Framework 2, and he knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not. His natural impulses naturally lead him toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses. The child is innately honest. When he gets sick he intuitively knows the reason why, and he knows quite well that he brought about the illness.

Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him — either the outside environment, or [something] working against him from within. The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet.” Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Sally.” He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his body itself was invaded despite his will. He learns that such beliefs are acceptable. It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.

(10:46.) Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness, with his or her behavior condoned. The child may know that the illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand. Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parents’ assessment of the situation. Little by little the fine relationship, the precise connections between psychological feelings and bodily reality, erode.

When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he [or she] usually grants his recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given. Or he may think that he was simply lucky — but he does not grant himself to have any real power in such an affair. The recovery seems to occur to him, as the illness seemed to happen to him. Usually the patient cannot see that he brought about his own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he cannot admit that his own intents were responsible for his own illness. He cannot learn from his own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.