“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is no magic in hypnosis. Each of you utilize it constantly. (See the 620th session in Chapter Four.) Only when particular procedures are assigned to it, and when it is set aside from normal life, does hypnotic suggestion seem so esoteric. Structured hypnosis merely allows the subject to utilize full powers of concentration, thereby activating unconscious mechanisms.

(Long pause at 9:54.) Your beliefs act like a hypnotist, then. As long as the particular directions are given, so will your “automatic” experience conform. The one suggestion that can break through is this: “I create my reality, and the present is my point of power.” If you do not like the effects of a belief you must alter it, for no manipulation of the exterior conditions themselves will release you. If you truly understand your power of action and decision in the present, then you will not be hypnotized by past events.

Think of the present as a pool of experience drawn from many sources, fed, in your terms, by tributaries from both the past and the future. There are an infinite number of such tributaries (probabilities), and through your beliefs you choose from these, adjusting their currents. For example: If you constantly focus on the belief that your early background was damaging and negative, then only such experiences will flow into your present life from the past. It does no good to say, “But my life was traumatic,” therefore reinforcing the belief. You must in one way or another modify that conviction, or preferably change it entirely — or you will never escape from its effects. This does not mean “lying” to yourself; but if it seems to you that your background held no joys, accomplishments or pleasures, then you are lying to yourself now. You have concentrated upon the negative to such a degree that anything else seems invisible. (See the 644th session in Chapter Eleven.) From the present you have hypnotized yourself, viewing the past not as it was to your experience, but as it appears now in the light of your current beliefs.

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.

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.