“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is an enchanting suggestion, solemnly repeated many times, particularly after the turn of the century: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”¹

We often have in your society the opposite suggestion, however, given quite regularly: “Every day, in every way, I am growing worse, and so is the world.” You have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies. They are usually masked by the polite clothing of conventional acceptance. (Pause.) Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. The deaths are accepted almost as a matter of course. These are victims of war, without question. It seldom occurs to anyone that these are victims of beliefs (emphatically) — since the guns are quite real, and the bombs and the combat.

1. Seth cited the same famous autosuggestion from the work of the French psychotherapist, Emile Coué (1857–1926), in Chapter 4 of Personal Reality, and then as now, he was correct except for the first two words. He should have said: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” In a note for Personal Reality I wrote that “Coué was a pioneer in the study of suggestion, and wrote a book on the subject in the 1920s. His ideas were well received in Europe at the time, but weren’t in this country to any large degree. In fact, his lecture tour of the United States turned out to be a failure because of the hostile press reaction.”