“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

All of this can be avoided through the realization that your point of power is in the present, as stated earlier (in the 657th session in Chapter Fifteen). Not only do you operate within your own personal beliefs, of course, but within a mass system to which you subscribe to one degree or another. Within that organization medical insurance becomes a necessity for most of you, so I am not suggesting that you drop it. Nevertheless, let us look more closely at the situation.

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.

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.

Again, I am not saying, “Do not give vitamins to children,” for within your framework this becomes nearly mandatory. You will find more vitamins to treat more diseases. As long as the system works it will be accepted — but the trouble is that it is not working very well.