“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(“The same applies to underweight conditions. In each case frequent attention to the scales serves as another negative stimulus, reinforcing the condition. The effort to eat more will be as resisted by the chronically underweight, as the effort to refrain from eating will be by the obese. Not only will these reactions occur, but opposing tendencies will be brought to bear. The concentration upon not eating, and the resulting tension, may instead cause increased consumption. And the underweight person may actually eat less the harder he or she tries to eat more — the latter being interpreted as an impossibility by the overriding belief in the underweight condition.