“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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 formal hypnosis you make an agreement with the hypnotist: For a while you will accept his ideas about reality instead of your own. If he tells you that there is a pink elephant in front of you, then you will see it and believe it is there, and act according to the suggestions given. If you are a good subject and your hypnotist a good practitioner, then blisters can arise on your skin if he tells you that you have been burned.

You are told what to look for; you are as cursed — far more — as any native in a tiny village, only you lose breasts, appendixes, and other portions of your anatomy. The doctors follow their own ideas, of course, and in that system they see themselves as completely justified — as humane.

(11:02.) What does all of this mean to you in your daily life, and how can you utilize natural hypnosis to better your experience?

In those areas in which you are dissatisfied, you feel that you are powerless, or that your will is paralyzed, or that conditions continue despite what you think of as your intent. Yet if you pay attention to your own quite conscious thoughts, you will find that you are concentrating upon precisely those negative aspects that so appall you. You are hypnotizing yourself quite effectively and so reinforcing the situation. You may say, horrified, “What can I do? I am hypnotizing myself into my overweight condition (or my loneliness, or my poor health).” Yet in other facets of your life you may be hypnotizing yourself into wealth, accomplishment, satisfaction — and here you do not complain. The same issues are involved. The same principles are operating. In those positive life situations you are certain of your initiative. There is no doubt. Your beliefs become reality.

What should you do, then? First of all, you must realize that you are the hypnotist. You must seize the initiative here as you have in other positive aspects of your life. Whatever the superficial reasons for your beliefs, you must say:

For a certain amount of time I will momentarily suspend what I believe in this area, and willfully accept the belief I want. I will pretend that I am under hypnosis, with myself as hypnotist and subject. For that time desire and belief will be one. There will be no conflict because I do this willingly. For this period I will completely alter my old beliefs. Even though I sit quietly, in my mind I will act as if the belief I want were mine completely.

If you do this faithfully, within a month you will find the new conditions materializing in your experience. Your neurological structure will respond automatically. The unconscious will be aroused, bringing its great powers to bear, bringing you the new results. Do not try to overdo this, to go through the entire day worrying about beliefs, for example. This can only cause you to contrast what you have with what you want. Forget the exercise when it is completed. You will find yourself with impulses that arrive in line with these newly inserted beliefs, and then it is up to you to act on these and not ignore them.