“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Let us give a simple example, using a positive belief instilled in childhood. An individual is told that he is comely, well-proportioned, and possesses a likeable personality. The idea takes hold. The person acts in line with this belief in all ways; but also a variety of subsidiary beliefs grow up about the main one.

Data or stimuli that does not agree is a side issue, not personally applicable but present, he realizes, as fact for others. He will not need to prove himself, so it will be easier for him to accept contemporaries with fairness.

Now: In those terms he may or may not be as attractive, feature by feature, as some other individuals who believe, in fact, that they are unattractive. The belief in his own comeliness is so important that others will react to him in the same fashion. An individual can have great native beauty, for example, but this beauty is not apparent to others, or to the individual. The person does not believe that he or she possesses it, and mars the actual physical features so that the comeliness becomes literally invisible.

(9:38.) This inner communication acts like the constant repetition of a hypnotist. In this case, however, you are your own hypnotist. Few people will have simply one main area of concentration. Usually several are involved, but these represent the ways in which you are using your energy. The individual who takes it for granted that he is worthwhile does not need to belabor the point. His ensuing experiences come naturally to him. In many areas of your own life, those in which you are satisfied, you need make no effort. Your conscious thoughts and concentrations bring about results with which you are pleased. It is only in those compartments of your life that confound you that you suddenly begin to wonder what is happening — but here also, natural hypnosis is at work just as easily and naturally, and your conscious ideas are automatically coming to physical fruition. So it is in these areas that you must realize that you are the hypnotist.

In each person’s experience, there are areas with which he or she is pleased. When you find yourself dissatisfied, however, question the orders you are giving in that particular arena of experience. The results do not seem, now, to follow your conscious desires. But you will find that they do follow your conscious beliefs, which may be quite different.

You may desire health, but believe implicitly in your state of poor health. You may desire spiritual understanding, while thinking that you are spiritually unworthy and opaque. (Pause.) When you set your longing against a present belief there is always conflict. Your belief will generate the proper feelings and imaginative endeavors characteristic of it. If you want to be healthy and continually contrast what you want with the present conviction in your poor health, then the belief itself, set up against the desire, will cause added difficulties. In such a case you seem to want the impossible. Desire and belief are not united but apart.

In your terms, beliefs are accepted initially from the parents — this, as mentioned earlier, having to do with mammalian experience. (See the 619th session in Chapter Four.) The hypnotist then acts as a parent substitute. In cases of therapy, an individual is already frightened, and because of the beliefs in your civilization he looks not to himself but to an authority figure for help.

In the medical field, as in no other, you are faced directly with the full impact of your beliefs, for doctors are not the healthiest, but the least healthy. They fall prey to the beliefs to which they so heartily subscribe. Their concentration is upon disease, not health.

To a medical man all of this will seem like the sheerest heresy, because disease will always be seen as an objective thing in the body, to be objectively treated and removed. But a man who feels “that he has no heart” will not be saved by the most sophisticated heart transplant, unless first that belief is changed.

At this point do not think of the future, but only of the present. If you are overweight, insert the weight that you think is ideal for you while you are following this exercise. Imagine that you are healthy if you have the belief that you are not. If you are lonely, believe that you are filled with the feeling of companionship instead. Realize that you are exerting your initiative to imagine such situations. Here there can be no comparison with your normal situation. Use visual data, or words — whatever is most natural to you. And again, no more than ten minutes is required.

(Pause.) The initiative must be yours. You will never know unless you try the exercise. Now if you are in poor health, and have a physician, you had better continue going to him, because you still rely on that system of belief — but use these exercises as supplements to build up your own sense of inner health, and to protect you against any negative suggestions given by your doctor. Utilize the belief in physicians since you have it.