“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.

(I reminded her of a couple of subjects I hoped Seth would discuss, as he’d promised to do some time ago: 1. The great flood of June, 1972, in this area, and our roles in it; see the notes for the 613th session in Chapter One. 2. Birth defects, as occasionally referred to by Seth in the course of this book.

But behind that there is far more; for if you do not believe in your own worth as a human being, then you will simply get other symptoms that have to be removed in the same manner, using other “past” events as the excuse for the condition — if you are lucky. If you are not so lucky and your illness happens to involve your inner organs, then you may end up sacrificing one after another.

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.

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.

Again, I am not saying, “Do not give vitamins to children,” for within your framework this becomes nearly mandatory. You will find more vitamins to treat more diseases. As long as the system works it will be accepted — but the trouble is that it is not working very well.

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.

In all such situations, it is highly important that you do not concentrate your main attention in that area of experience with which you are least satisfied. This acts as a deepening of hypnotic suggestion. Just reminding yourself of your other accomplishments will by itself operate in a constructive fashion, even if nothing else is done. Such focus of attention on positive aspects automatically pulls your energy away from the problem. It also builds up your own sense of worth and power as you are reminded of adequate performance at other levels of experience.

Whenever you are trying to rid yourself of a dilemma, make sure that you do not concentrate your attention upon it instead. This acts to cut out other data, and to further intensify your focus upon your difficulty. When you break that focus the problem is solved.

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.

(Jane and I discussed the above data at breakfast the morning after the session. This led me to read her my notes on Seth’s delivery from 11:25 to 11:47, concerning beliefs in relation to body weight. Then after lunch Jane spontaneously wrote the material beginning in the next paragraph; she regards this data as supplementing Seth’s own information on weight. “I didn’t hear any voice while I was doing this,” she said later. “I felt these ideas being inserted, but I did the writing.” The work is close to the way Seth would present it; it probably stems from her efforts last night, we think, to see what she could do with “book work” on her own:

(“Diets do serve momentarily as outer signs that you are in control, and can seize the initiative; and as such they can be important. Usually, however, a pattern of unsuccessful diets occurs, operating then as a series of negative suggestions. The resistance is the result of conflicts in beliefs. You think you are overweight and accept this as reality. Steps to lose weight do not make sense in the face of that belief. They are ‘unrealistic’ or even impossible.

(“The best thing to do is to stop all such efforts, but instantly begin altering your beliefs as instructed in this chapter.