“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If — now, a brief innocuous-enough example — you meet an individual often enough and think, “He gives me a pain in the neck,” it is surely no coincidence that you find yourself with a painful neck in future encounters with this person. The suggestion is quite a conscious one, however (emphatically), given by yourself and carried out not symbolically but most practically, most literally. In other words, the conscious mind gives its orders and the inner self carries them out.

Now: You may be poor. Following my suggestions, you may try to alter the belief and say, “My wants are taken care of and I have a great abundance.” Yet you may still find yourself unable to meet your bills.

You may be trying to remember your dreams — another example. You may give yourself appropriate suggestions each night, only to awaken again with no memory of them. You may say, “Consciously I want to remember my dreams, but my suggestions do not work. Therefore what I want on a conscious level has little significance.”

Only by examining these ideas of your own can you learn where you stand with yourself. Now I do not mean to stress the negative by any means, so I suggest that you look to those areas of your life in which you are pleased and have done well. See how emotionally and imaginatively you personally reinforced those beliefs and brought them to physical fruition — realize how naturally and automatically the results appeared. Catch hold of those feelings of accomplishment and understand that you can use the same methods in other areas.

(A note added later: “I was wrong about this being the title of the next chapter,” Jane wrote in November, “but I know it will be one….” However, not only was the end of this chapter not so imminent; Seth never did use Jane’s suggested chapter heading.)