“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You will often try to project a problem outward to free yourself. If this is done the question at issue will seem forever outside of you, beyond solution, and of mass proportion. Let us look into a situation involving a woman I will call Dineen, who telephoned Ruburt today from a Western state, and see one of the predicaments that can arise.

(Pause.) Dineen is a well-educated woman of middle age with several grown children, financially at ease, possessing all of the things that money can buy. She called Ruburt, nearly in a frenzy — desperate, she said, for help. Since she has written Ruburt several times, he was aware of the situation. Dineen was convinced that she was being cursed, hypnotized, and had fallen under the domination of another.

(10:13.) Ruburt correctly perceived the great need for a zest and excitement in this woman’s life, for initiative. It was apparent that Dineen sat alone all day in her lovely home with nothing to do; that she was making no effort to face her situation truly, but looking to others to do it for her, and therefore reinforcing her sense of powerlessness. She felt she had no power in the moment.

This is an abdication of the severest kind, involving both your spirituality and your biological nature; you feel trapped far more than an animal in a dire situation, and you deny yourself the ability to act. The withheld power is itself transferred, then. In Dineen’s case it was put onto another. If she could not make decisions this other person could, through long-distance hypnosis, force her to act whether she wanted to or not.

Now the other individual has no power that Dineen does not possess. (Pause.) Dineen heartily believes in good and evil; so, being convinced that she was at the mercy of demoniacal forces, she began to pray. As Ruburt pointed out, however, the prayers themselves were merely a weak surrender to the idea that evil is so powerful. They were not based on any real belief in the power of good, but only upon a superstitious hope that if bad forces exist, good ones must also.

Ruburt explained, after hearing about the automatic communications, that these were simply repressed elements of the subconscious finding needed outlet. He suggested that Dineen find herself a job, stop seeing psychics, and assert her own individuality and her own responsibility for action. Dineen believed that other people acted oddly toward her because they had all been hypnotized into doing so. If someone frowned at her, this was the result of hypnotic suggestion. All of this may sound exotic to some of you, and be only too real to others, but any time that you assign elements of your experience to exterior sources, you are really doing the same thing that Dineen did.

She felt that certain rituals or foods warded off this evil hypnotic suggestion. Yet many of you take vitamins, convinced that they will save you from various diseases. Within Dineen’s belief system she was acting quite rationally — and in your belief system you are doing the same.

You are convinced of the reality of illness. It may not be “out to get you” as viciously as Dineen believes that evil is bent on threatening her, but the issues are the same.

(10:29.) If you believe that you come down with a cold every time you are in a draft, you are using natural hypnosis. If you think that you must come and go at everyone else’s beck and call, then you are like Dineen, who believes that she must do what this “hypnotist” tells her to do. In her case Dineen gave up the responsibility for action and initiative, yet because one must act the reasons were assigned to another. Ruburt also pointed this out. Dineen asked for advice from me and again Ruburt said, quite correctly, “You must learn to stop depending upon others, to use your own common sense. You must stop trying to use one symbol against another, and look at your own life and your beliefs.”

Now: Dineen carefully chose the territory in which these adventures would take place. For some time, with her children grown, she had felt alone, unnecessary, denied the structure of vital action in which she had to care for her family earlier. And so the great energy of her being, before taken up by her children, had no outlet.

Now her life, while difficult, has its own excitement. She is a heroine, battling cosmic forces of good and evil, important enough so that another person even wants to control her. Even the animals seek stimuli and feel a zest for existence; so in this way Dineen, in a misguided manner, is still giving expression to a definite need of her being.

Ruburt also suggested a counselor, but until Dineen is ready to exchange the beliefs she has for others that will allow her to fulfill her own abilities, she will still be in difficulty.

Dineen is in excellent physical health, however, and is an extremely attractive woman. She did not choose a situation in which either her health or beauty would be imperiled. She also stayed clear of any sexual involvement outside of marriage. She chose the psychic arena because she felt it to be out of the ordinary to begin with, and invested with all kinds of mystery. Any difficulties encountered there would automatically have a kind of glamour and distinction. The more she was reassured by others with the same beliefs, the deeper her involvement grew.

For all her talk of desperation, then, Dineen has chosen her field of conflict. She will avoid any kind of disfiguration or severe health problem, which to her would be a far greater danger. Because of different personal characteristics, another individual will hold qualities of the mind, say, inviolate, and work out challenges through bodily illness. Another may choose the severest poverty, projecting into that situation his or her own resolved conflicts. Another may choose alcoholism.

Dineen, denied the support of the framework she had chosen, would have to face the questions that she had projected there. But all of the inner difficulties can be resolved by understanding that you form your own reality, and that your point of power is in the present (with emphasis).