“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Honestly,” Jane said the morning after last Wednesday’s session, “I think I was doing book work in my sleep the whole night — only I kept hearing my own voice instead of Seth’s. I even thought of getting up and trying to write down the material, except that I didn’t think it would really work that way. I just hope we’ll get all that great stuff when we do have sessions….” These sleep-state effects were surprisingly persistent; although they were somewhat reduced when she encountered them again on Thursday night, they didn’t taper off altogether until the weekend. One of Jane’s previous experiences in obtaining book material in advance — that on bridge beliefs — is described in the 644th session in Chapter Eleven. Her next nighttime involvement with Seth’s book is reported at the end of this session.

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.

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.

If you are feeling poorly and happen to read an advertisement for vitamins, or a book about them, and are impressed, you will indeed benefit — at least for a while. Your belief will make them work for you, but if your insistence upon poor health persists, then the counter suggestion represented by the vitamins will not be effective for long.

The point of power is in the present. You must thoroughly understand that, and then you can take hold of your life and begin to use natural hypnosis for your benefit in all areas. It works advantageously for each of you now in those portions of your lives with which you are pleased.

(Apropos of the notes preceding this session, concerning Jane’s nighttime work on Seth’s book last week: the same kind of effects returned when she went to sleep after this session — but this time she decided to try an experiment. “When I woke up I felt I ‘had’ the whole of four or five chapters ‘all there’ if I could somehow instantly transcribe them,” she wrote the next morning. “I got up at 3:15 a.m., intending to write everything down — and found that the bulk of it had just vanished.

(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….

(Jane and I discussed the above data at breakfast the morning after the session. This led me to read her my notes on Seth’s delivery from 11:25 to 11:47, concerning beliefs in relation to body weight. Then after lunch Jane spontaneously wrote the material beginning in the next paragraph; she regards this data as supplementing Seth’s own information on weight. “I didn’t hear any voice while I was doing this,” she said later. “I felt these ideas being inserted, but I did the writing.” The work is close to the way Seth would present it; it probably stems from her efforts last night, we think, to see what she could do with “book work” on her own:

(“Last night I also felt that Seth’s Appendix — if there is one — could deal with notes on particular chapters; methods of using natural hypnosis in certain cases; work on beliefs, etc.”)