“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.