“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Can you hear me?

Now. You were disappointed, then, shortly after you made your move, and you began to retreat. Whether or not you are consciously aware of this, in your earlier life, when you became extremely nervous or upset or had a bad problem, you began to “shut down” stimuli. You did not hear as well. When you wanted to retreat from the world, you shut down on your hearing so that you were not distracted. The habit simply persisted, and you grasped upon it as the situation continued. Now. Because of some circumstances and conflicts with your husband in this life in the past, you did not want to hear what he had to say. You were finished listening to him, and therefore with him, particularly, you began to have trouble hearing.

I want to tell you what I know about your days, and then I will tell you what you must do to change them, You are beginning to organize your life about your lack of hearing. You are beginning to make it a characteristic. You are beginning to force other people to relate to you in that regard. Now you are obviously doing this because you are getting something out of it, and you must discover what that something is and I will help you.

In periods of depression you feel that your life, the main points, have passed, and that you have lost time—important time that you feel you cannot recover. All of these fears work together to cause the present difficulty. Now. There is no one who can change your life for you. But you can change it. And in that lies your hope and your salvation. And so you must begin to do so. You are now organizing your life about your hearing defect. In the main, you are forcing others again to relate to you in that regard. You mention it often. You bring it into the conversation. When I tell you now, “often,” it would not otherwise be noticed, for you also exaggerate the extent of the hearing loss. I did not say there was not a loss. I am saying you are exaggerating the loss that there is.

There are several things that I will ask you to do. First, however, you must begin to love sound. You must not concentrate thinking: “I cannot hear.” “What is there to hear?” “What are they saying?” “How bad is my hearing today?” You must instead sensually enjoy those sounds that come to you, and even imagine sounds when you are alone. Now this will automatically set your inner self toward the anticipation of further sound. You must take at least an hour a day during which you do not think of loss of hearing, and I will give you some hints as to how to do this.

Regardless of your farm, you, in your own mind, feel “scattered”—that you are not doing enough in other directions, and you are not sure what those directions are. You feel blocked. You are doing two things with the ears, of course. You are telling yourself that you want to hear. The other part of you is saying: “I do not want to hear!” “I do not want to hear what you have to say.” You are, therefore, sending contradictory messages. This accounts for the decrease in hearing.

Your ears, your hearing, will improve when you realize that the cause is an inner one and when you bring the problem out into the open, and when you use certain techniques that are simply aids. If you do this, you can improve without an operation.

I have told you what I think. The hearing, you see; the state of the hearing, is among other things a symbolic, physical statement of the lack of communication that has existed between you and your husband. Only now it is you who will not hear. That is not the only cause for the condition, however. The “habit” was set in the past when you “shut out” noise that you did not want to hear. You are in the habit of shutting out sound.

In this is this life material. You are in the habit of shutting out sound. Now, you can even catch yourself if you are alert enough doing this by the feeling that you have. In a conversation—now listen to me—In a conversation that you now decide sounds boring when you enter it, you can catch yourself thinking: “This is boring. I will not bother to listen. It is too much trouble.” Now you think those thoughts come to you because it is so difficult for you to hear. Instead, those thoughts were yours long before the disability showed itself. You thought that way first, before the condition, And whenever unpleasantness arose, you would make a series of decisions to shut out the sound until these decisions, one upon the other, finally “conditioned” you; you conditioned yourself not to hear. The problem is that after awhile, you see, you conditioned yourself so well that you no longer control the process that you began. And only then do you become frightened.

You must be willing, however, to accept whatever comes of the communication. The first time it becomes unpleasant, you cannot, therefore, the next time say: “This time I will not hear”.

([Mary:] “... You have to hear it out....)

([Mary:] “You have to hear it out.”)

Now, listen. You are not “hearing me out”. As you behave with me, you behave with your husband and. others. You are not listening to me so much as thinking of your next question and what you want to say.

Now this does not necessarily refer to me, here. But if you do not care what they think, then, again, you will not listen. Observe yourself—in conversation. I do not mean to watch yourself so closely that you cannot think, but observe your own reactions and your thoughts. Honestly ask yourself in situations: “Do I want to hear? And if I do not, why don’t I?”

Now. Often, you use sound as a barrier. Also, you use monologs, and set up a barrier of sound to protect yourself from other people. And you do not realize that you do this. You erect barriers like walls—so that someone wanting to communicate with you cannot get through, cannot find a “hole” in your conversation to reach you. And the more nervous you are, the more frantically you erect this barrier of sound. You use sound as a barrier, therefore, and when you become doubly threatened, then you do not hear the sounds that come from without, but retreat from them. The entire “gestalt of sound” is therefore highly important to you in your “mechanism of survival”. You have used it to protect yourself, either erecting sound yourself to protect you from communications coming from without, or, when this fails, by refusing—refusing to hear. You must, therefore, ask yourself where this charged attitude toward sound originated, and why you use it in such a way. And I will give you some clues.

Now. So far, you are denying a good portion of your hearing because sound can be unpleasant, and carrying this a bit further now, it can also be “bad.” You know the three little monkeys who sit: “see no evil” and so forth. Now you have simply hit upon the “hear no evil.” You have added to it the fact that you will not indulge yourself in joy, or in joyful pursuits, Unless you can rationalize to yourself by saying: “I am doing this for someone else,” and that is the only reason you let yourself work with the necklaces that you made. You could say: “I am making these for class members” and therefore justify the pleasure.

Imagine for an experiment, now, a world in which there is no sound. Do not imagine that you are deaf. That is not what I am saying. But imagine that the world itself has no sound for anyone to hear. Do you see the difference?

You are imagining a situation in which there is no sound to be heard; whether or not you have ears, there is no sound. Then, imagine that, suddenly, a raindrop falls and makes a first sound... the first sound that can ever be heard. And imagine the impact and the beauty of that sound. Then slowly imagine other sounds appearing in the world, appearing in the same way that a flower might appear, so that sounds begin to be born in the universe. Imagine, then, the joy of hearing that sound in a world that had known none. Whatever sounds, then, that imaginatively come to you, feel the brilliance and miracle of them as they are born out of the silence. And then give thanks for a world of sound, and let yourself revel that you live in this world where sound is a part of your environment and surroundings. In all of this, do not think about your ears, but do the imaginative exercise exactly as I have suggested it. That alone, done once a day, will help arouse again within you the joy and wonder of that particular sense.

Now you used the energy that your classmate (Eleanor) was sending you for other overall purposes. While you did not want to hear, her energy could not force you to hear. Indeed, you would automatically put up a defense, because you considered not hearing to be important to your survival. The exercise that I just suggested to you will, if followed, now, help you open up sufficiently so that energy sent to you can be utilized for that specific difficulty. But while you refused to hear, you would consider energy sent to you particularly to make you hear also a threat to your survival, and would be determined to block it. You must realize that your survival depends upon enjoying all of your senses fully. Reading the session alone should help you realize that.

Take your paints outside sometime. Think! How precious voices are! In your terms, they speak, and the sounds are gone and never recaptured. And who are you to say: “I will not listen, for this is trivial.” These sounds are magic. Be thankful for them. You will never again be the personality that you are at this moment. Whatever self you will be, in your terms, or you were, each of those selves are unique, as you are unique. When you hear him (Rob) speak, his words are the magical signatures of the psyche, materialized in certain ways within this moment as you understand a time, and precious and a joy to hear. And so are the words of every man and woman, and the sound of every bird and every raindrop—precious beyond recall. So do not close yourselves to those sounds, and be thankful for them.

You have been afraid of displaying emotions. You think that tears are cowardly. You have not wanted to face your own emotions, therefore you are frightened of the emotions of others. You did not, habitually, display your emotions to your husband. Now he could more easily express some of his to you. He got out of the habit, however, You did not want to hear them. You consider tears “degrading.” You considered, in the past, joy “evil.” This did not leave you too many acceptable emotions.

It did originate in a past life, as mentioned, but it did not have to reassert itself, now. It served your purposes, however. And it was also another method of retreat. You did not have to go out into a strange enviroment, away from the home and hearth. Now, it predated the hearing difficulty in its strongest form, but the “habits” were always with you. You always “favored” one foot more than the other, and you built up muscular reaction. When you began to “clear” your foot—when you got the new shoes—your hearing gave you more difficulty. You needed more of a crutch, to make up for the symptom you had lost, simply because you did not understand the reasons behind the difficulties. And without understanding, you can medically rid yourself of one condition, only to make ready certain that you have another one planned to take over! You were finally driven to some kind of desperation, so you accepted the new shoes. You used the symbol. You could have been quite as comfortable without the new shoe, but the symbol was a good one, and you used it and took advantage of it.

But then you became frightened, and that is when the hearing difficulty, then, bothered you so deeply. You will not need to substitute symptoms in such a fashion, as you learn to look into yourself.

([Mary:] “Because I only have ten more days till I get the hearing test, and I have a feeling that he’ll want this specialist to go in there and work.”)