“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, you make your own reality. When you view the world, social groups, political groups, your friends, your private experience — these are all attracted into your realm of activity by your beliefs. Natural hypnosis, as explained in the last chapter, leads you to seek out those situations that will confirm your beliefs, and to avoid those that threaten them.

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.

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.