(“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.

(During class, Seth commented that this latest Sumari development would help her decipher the very ancient — and largely oral — Speaker “manuscripts” that she mentions in her Introduction. He didn’t say just how this translation was to be accomplished, though. For more notes on the Speakers, and Sumari, see the 623rd session in Chapter Five.)

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.

(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.

Ideas of worth are involved here also, and the point of power as mentioned earlier. (See the 657th session in Chapter Fifteen.) In any area, great clues can be received simply through paying more attention to the conscious thoughts that you have during the day, for each of them serve as minute suggestions, modifying your behavioral patterns and affecting bodily mechanisms.

(Long pause at 11:47.) Next chapter.

CHAPTER 17

(Another long pause at 11:49. Jane’s pace had abruptly slowed drastically. Mysteriously, she now took over six minutes to deliver the title for Chapter Seventeen.)

(This took half a page or so, and the session ended at 12:03 a.m. Jane was very surprised at the time involved in delivering the title for Chapter Seventeen. She had no explanations to offer; in trance she’d experienced only “a brief sense of waiting.”

(Apropos of the notes preceding this session, concerning Jane’s nighttime work on Seth’s book last week: the same kind of effects returned when she went to sleep after this session — but this time she decided to try an experiment. “When I woke up I felt I ‘had’ the whole of four or five chapters ‘all there’ if I could somehow instantly transcribe them,” she wrote the next morning. “I got up at 3:15 a.m., intending to write everything down — and found that the bulk of it had just vanished.

(Jane was left with a page or so of fragmented notes and a couple of possible chapter headings. This is still evocative material, even though she doesn’t know whether Seth will use any of it in his book: “For a ‘Power Chapter’: Each person has his or her own ‘psychic territory of power’ which is not to be relinquished,” she wrote. “…no illness or other condition is allowed to impinge upon this…. It’s far better to think in terms of power than of lacks — the power of life, of motion, of speech, etc. People confuse this with power over their environment, or others, then wonder why power over doesn’t work….

(And: “A chapter on a person’s ‘Effective Personal Reality’ — about the private purposes in one’s life, and the bounds of creaturehood as set by your body; what you choose to be born with as far as health, disease, poverty or wealth, ability, etc., are concerned.”

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

(“Last night I also felt that Seth’s Appendix — if there is one — could deal with notes on particular chapters; methods of using natural hypnosis in certain cases; work on beliefs, etc.”)