“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Hypnosis clearly shows in concentrated form the way in which your beliefs affect your behavior in normal life. The various methods simply focus all of your concentration upon a specific area, shutting out any distractions.

Many beliefs were originally accepted as a result of such a situation, without any formal induction, but when the circumstances were right. A period of panic induces immediate accelerated concentration. All the forces of energy are mobilized at once, while little relaxation is usually involved.

First of all, the unconscious is not a sponge, indiscriminately accepting material regardless of the considerations of your conscious self. All beliefs or suggestions are first sifted through your conscious mind, and only those that you accept are then permitted their penetration into the other areas of the self.

Quite without any inductions, you have “hypnotized” yourself into all the beliefs that you have. This simply means that you have consciously accepted them, focused upon them, excluded data to the contrary, narrowed your interests to those specific points, and accordingly activated the unconscious mechanisms that then materialize those convictions through physical experience.

(Pause.) Formal hypnosis merely brings about an accelerated version of what goes on all the time. It is a perfect example of the instantaneous results possible ideally — but not usually seen practically — as present beliefs negate past ones.

Let us first of all discuss the nature of hypnosis, quite natural hypnosis, and the ways in which you use it now. Then you will see how you can utilize it quite easily and deliberately in your present point of power.

Your reality is the result of a hallucination, if by this you mean that it is only the picture shown by your senses. Physically, of course, your existence is perceived through the senses. In that context corporeal life is an entranced one, with the focus of attention largely concentrated through the senses’ belief in the reality of their sensations. Yet that experience is the image that reality takes for you now, and so in other terms earthly life is one version of reality — not reality in its entirety, but a part of it. It is in itself an avenue through which you perceive what reality is. In order to explore that experience, you direct your attention to it and use all of your other (nonphysical) abilities as corollaries, adjuncts, additions. You hypnotize your very nerves, and the cells within your body, for they will react as you expect them to react, and the beliefs of your conscious mind are followed in degree by all portions of the self down to the smallest atom and molecule. The large events of your life, your interactions with others, including the habitual workings of the most minute physical events within your body — all of this follows your conscious belief.

Whenever you have your own undivided attention you act as hypnotist and subject simultaneously. You give yourselves post-hypnotic suggestions all the time, particularly when you project present conditions into the future. I want to impress upon you the fact that all of this simply follows the natural function of the mind, and to dispel any ideas that you have about the “magical” aspects of hypnosis.

(“All right.”)