“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Here posthypnotic suggestion operates as well as constant daily “conditioning.” Now: For an example, take a woman who feels compelled to wash her hands twenty or thirty times a day. It is easy to recognize the fact that such repeated behavior is compulsive. But when a man’s ulcers bother him every time he eats certain foods, it is more difficult to perceive the fact that this behavior is also compulsive and repetitive.

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.

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.

(10:53.) The same applies to the “public service announcements” dealing with tobacco and drugs alike. The suggestion that smoking will give you cancer is far more dangerous than the physical effects of smoking, and can give cancer to who people who might otherwise not be so affected (very intently).

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.

Let us return to the example of a gentleman who has ulcers. He believes implicitly that certain foods cause his stomach to behave in a particular manner. There is a medicine, however, that will stop his pain. As long as it is effective, the medicine further convinces him that his stomach difficulty can only be relieved in this fashion.

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.

(11:55. Now her pace began to pick up.) Some people who have been ill for years suddenly recover, and then throw themselves into some great beneficial social endeavor in which their own problems are lost, and a new stability is maintained. Often this represents a symbolic transference of symptoms from the body outward into the social structure.