“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In either case, if the therapy is effective you may give up your symptoms, if both you and the hypnotist implicitly believe in the situation and framework of those convictions.

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.

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.