“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.

The second health area I want to touch upon concerns the elderly. Ideas of retirement fall generally into the same pattern, for hidden within them is the belief that at one time or another, at a specific age, your powers will begin to fail. These ideas are usually accepted by young and old alike. In believing them, the young automatically begin the gradual conditioning of their own bodies and minds. The results will be reaped.

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.

Until you change your belief, you will continue to utilize your food in the same fashion — and to overeat. Momentary gains will not last. Your entire behavior pattern operates according to the strong hypnotic suggestions given, and then of course your appearance and experience always reinforce your belief.

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.

(“Diets do serve momentarily as outer signs that you are in control, and can seize the initiative; and as such they can be important. Usually, however, a pattern of unsuccessful diets occurs, operating then as a series of negative suggestions. The resistance is the result of conflicts in beliefs. You think you are overweight and accept this as reality. Steps to lose weight do not make sense in the face of that belief. They are ‘unrealistic’ or even impossible.