“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.

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.

Even more disadvantageous are the suggestions given, with the best of purposes in mind, concerning specific health areas dealing with prevention. There are two in particular that I would like to mention here.

Moral values become attached to food, with some seen as good and some as bad. Symptoms appear, and are quite directly considered to be the natural result of ingesting foods on the forbidden list. In this system, at least, the body is not insulted with a bewildering assortment of drugs for therapy. It may, however, be starved of very needed nourishment. Beyond that the whole problem of health and illness becomes simplistically applied, and here food is scrutinized. You are what you think, not what you eat — and to a large extent what you think about what you eat is far more important.

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.

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.