“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:42.) That is why belief systems are so important in dealing with health and illness. Each of the systems uses paraphernalia — gestures, medicine, treatment — that are the exterior manifestations of beliefs shared by healer and patient alike.

But behind that there is far more; for if you do not believe in your own worth as a human being, then you will simply get other symptoms that have to be removed in the same manner, using other “past” events as the excuse for the condition — if you are lucky. If you are not so lucky and your illness happens to involve your inner organs, then you may end up sacrificing one after another.

You are paying in advance for illness that you are certain will come your way. You are making all preparations in the present for a future of illness. You are betting upon disease and not health. This is the worst kind of natural hypnosis, and yet within your system insurance is indeed a necessity, because the belief in illness so pervades your mental atmosphere.

Many become ill only after taking out such “insurance” — and for those, the act itself symbolically represents an acceptance of disease. Even more unfortunate are the special policies for the elderly that detail in advance all of the most stereotyped and distorted concepts about health and age. There is a great correlation between the kind of policies that people take out, and the illnesses that they then fall prey to.

This does not mean that those individuals might not come down with another disease instead, but it does mean that the belief in disease is patterned and focused to particular symptoms by such methods. No wonder you need health insurance! Illness is not a foreign agency thrust upon you, but as long as you believe that it is, then you will accept it as such. You will also feel powerless to combat it.

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.

What you think about your body, health, and illness will determine how your food is used, and how your chemistry handles fats, for instance, or carbohydrates. Your attitudes in preparing meals are highly important.

Physically, it is true, but again generally speaking, that your body needs certain nourishments. But within that pattern there is great leeway, and the organism itself has the amazing capacity to make use of substitutes and alternates. The best diet in the world, by anyone’s standards, will not keep you healthy if you have a belief in illness.

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.

(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.

(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….