“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Honestly,” Jane said the morning after last Wednesday’s session, “I think I was doing book work in my sleep the whole night — only I kept hearing my own voice instead of Seth’s. I even thought of getting up and trying to write down the material, except that I didn’t think it would really work that way. I just hope we’ll get all that great stuff when we do have sessions….” These sleep-state effects were surprisingly persistent; although they were somewhat reduced when she encountered them again on Thursday night, they didn’t taper off altogether until the weekend. One of Jane’s previous experiences in obtaining book material in advance — that on bridge beliefs — is described in the 644th session in Chapter Eleven. Her next nighttime involvement with Seth’s book is reported at the end of this session.

This is an excellent example of the way in which natural hypnotism can act to affect your system adversely. In a manner of speaking, repetitious actions intimately involve beliefs at the “magical” level. The behavior usually represents efforts to ward off “evil” that the individual feels is imminent. While it is easy then to understand the nature of exterior actions of repetitive quality, it is far more difficult to see many physical symptoms in the same light — but here also whole groups of recurring reactions to certain stimuli are involved. Behind them there is often the same kind of compulsion. In their own way symptoms frequently operate, actually, as repetitive neurological ritual, meant to protect the sufferer from something else that he fears even more.

(Pause at 9:42.) That is why belief systems are so important in dealing with health and illness. Each of the systems uses paraphernalia — gestures, medicine, treatment — that are the exterior manifestations of beliefs shared by healer and patient alike.

Natural hypnosis and conscious beliefs give their proper instructions to the unconscious, which then dutifully affects the body mechanism so that it responds in a manner harmonious with the beliefs. So you condition your body to react in certain fashions. Dealing with this is not a simple problem, of course, for the original suggestion of dis-ease was in itself given because of another belief. Using formal hypnosis, and in the West, you may regress and discover where the suggestion was first given you. If you and your hypnotist believe in reincarnation, the source may be discovered in another life.

All of this can be avoided through the realization that your point of power is in the present, as stated earlier (in the 657th session in Chapter Fifteen). Not only do you operate within your own personal beliefs, of course, but within a mass system to which you subscribe to one degree or another. Within that organization medical insurance becomes a necessity for most of you, so I am not suggesting that you drop it. Nevertheless, let us look more closely at the situation.

You are paying in advance for illness that you are certain will come your way. You are making all preparations in the present for a future of illness. You are betting upon disease and not health. This is the worst kind of natural hypnosis, and yet within your system insurance is indeed a necessity, because the belief in illness so pervades your mental atmosphere.

One is the cancer drive literature, and television “public service” announcements, in which the seven danger signals of cancer are given. Unfortunately, again, within the framework of your beliefs this also becomes almost a necessity for many — especially for those who, because of previous experience of one kind or another with the disease, are almost irrational in their fear of it. The literature and announcements act as strong negative suggestions, following the nature of natural hypnosis — as a conditioning process, you see, where you are looking for specific symptoms, and examining your body under the impetus of fear.

This does not mean that those individuals might not come down with another disease instead, but it does mean that the belief in disease is patterned and focused to particular symptoms by such methods. No wonder you need health insurance! Illness is not a foreign agency thrust upon you, but as long as you believe that it is, then you will accept it as such. You will also feel powerless to combat it.

The second health area I want to touch upon concerns the elderly. Ideas of retirement fall generally into the same pattern, for hidden within them is the belief that at one time or another, at a specific age, your powers will begin to fail. These ideas are usually accepted by young and old alike. In believing them, the young automatically begin the gradual conditioning of their own bodies and minds. The results will be reaped.

In your society particularly, given over so thoroughly to the pursuit of money, such beliefs bring about the most humiliating situations, especially for the male, who has often been told to equate his virility with his earning power. It is easy then to understand that when his capacity to earn is taken away he feels castrated. Period, break.

Now: Generally speaking, those who advocate health foods or natural foods subscribe to some of the same overall beliefs held by your physicians.

Physically, it is true, but again generally speaking, that your body needs certain nourishments. But within that pattern there is great leeway, and the organism itself has the amazing capacity to make use of substitutes and alternates. The best diet in the world, by anyone’s standards, will not keep you healthy if you have a belief in illness.

A belief in health can help you utilize a “poor” diet to an amazing degree. If you are convinced that a specific food will give you a particular disease, it will indeed do so. It appears that certain vitamins will prevent certain diseases. The belief itself works while you are operating within that framework, of course. A Western doctor may give vitamin shots or pills to a native child in another culture. The child need not know what particular vitamin is being given, or the name for his disease, but if he believes in the physician and Western medicine he will indeed improve, and he will need the vitamins from then on. So will all the other children.

If you are feeling poorly and happen to read an advertisement for vitamins, or a book about them, and are impressed, you will indeed benefit — at least for a while. Your belief will make them work for you, but if your insistence upon poor health persists, then the counter suggestion represented by the vitamins will not be effective for long.

The well-meaning announcements pertaining to heroin, marijuana, and acid (LSD) can also be damaging, in that they structure in advance any experience that people who take drugs might have. On the one hand, you have a culture that publicly points out as common the often exaggerated dangers that can occur with drugs, and on the other holds out drugs as a method of therapy. Here the dangers become something like initiation rites, in which loss of life must be faced before full acceptance into the community can be established. But those involved with native initiation rituals knew far more what they were doing, and understood a framework of beliefs in which the outcome — success — was fairly well assured.

It becomes a counter suggestion, yet it is all a part of the same hypnotic process, based upon his belief in his original illness. While it gives temporary results, the fact that he needs it reinforces his dependency upon it. If his belief in his poor health continues unchecked, the medicine will no longer serve as an adequate counter measure. It would seem only good sense to refrain from the foods that bring on the condition. Yet each time this is done, the individual acquiesces more and more to the hypnotic suggestion.

He fully believes he will become ill if he eats the forbidden foods, and so he does. It never occurs to him to dispense with the belief — to realize that it alone sets up the conditioning process through the operation of self-hypnotism.

(Pause, in another fast delivery.) Let us take another example, a very simple one. You are overweight. It is a physical fact. It grieves you, but you believe it completely. You begin a round of diets, all based on the idea that you are overweight because you eat too much. Instead, you eat too much because you believe that you are overweight. The physical picture always fits because your belief in being overweight conditions your body to behave in just such a manner.

In the oddest fashion, then, your diets simply reinforce the condition — since you diet because you believe so deeply in your overweight condition.

Until you change your belief, you will continue to utilize your food in the same fashion — and to overeat. Momentary gains will not last. Your entire behavior pattern operates according to the strong hypnotic suggestions given, and then of course your appearance and experience always reinforce your belief.

(11:39.) You must, therefore, willingly suspend that belief. Using the exercises given in this chapter, you must make a conscious effort to insert a different belief; employ natural hypnosis in this new way. If you realize your own worth after reading this book, then that realization in the present can negate any past ideas of unworthiness that may have attracted you to the condition.

The same applies if you are underweight, of course. You can eat a great deal for a while and only gain a few pounds, or find all kinds of excuses for not eating. You can be served the richest diet, yet gain no weight. You are not underweight because you do not eat enough food, or utilize it properly. Instead, you do not eat enough because you believe that you are underweight.

No amount of food will be sufficient until you alter your belief.

The same procedures as just given for those who are overweight should be used. In each case body conditioning is set up through natural hypnosis. Daily behavior and chemical functioning smoothly follow according to the belief.