“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A sudden conversion may completely rid an individual of physical symptoms — any kind of conversion. Under that general term I include a strong emotional arousal and fresh emotional involvement, affiliation, or sense of belonging. This may involve religion, politics, art, or simply falling in love.

(Pause.) Love, as it is often experienced, allows an individual to take his sense of self-worth from another for a time, and to at least momentarily let the other’s belief in his goodness supersede his own beliefs in lack of worth. Again, I make a distinction between this and a greater love in which two individuals, knowing their own worth, are able to give and to receive.

(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.

(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.”

The individual is made to feel powerless, at the mercy of doctors or nurses who often do not have the time or energy to be personable, or to explain his [or her] condition in terms that he can understand. The patient is therefore forced to transfer his own sense of power to others, which further deepens his misery; this in turn reinforces the sense of powerlessness that initiated his condition.

(Pause.) In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood. There is little emotional involvement. (Long pause.) The senile, in their efforts to run away from their closeted rooms in sanitariums, often show far greater sanity in their way than the relative or society who imprisoned them. For they intuitively recognize the need to be free, and they sense the lack of the mystic communion with the earth that has been denied them. (See the 650th session in Chapter Thirteen.)