“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The money was also a symbol of communication as far as both of you were concerned. It was not the money, but your ideas about the money. And clashes that resulted.

I mention it only to show you how you operate. It is obvious in this situation. It is a characteristic. You are sometimes so impatient to express your own ideas that you do not listen to others. Also, often, you do not care, quite frankly, what they think.

You overeat, to compensate for the other joys that you do not allow yourself. If you began to paint for an hour a day, you would not need to eat so much. When you bring food and drink with you, you do two things. You bring along your own “security blanket”, for one thing. You also show that you are insecure and frightened outside of the home environment, and must bring nourishment from there along with you. Now the joy that you experience when you are painting will be yours, and not desert you whether you stay in your house or go to someone else’s. You will not have to worry about “carting it along” with you. As you probably suspect, the overeating is the one great indulgence that you allow yourself, and even then you surround it with all kinds of taboos. It is not the fact that you overeat, and that you are desperately frightened because you overeat—because of your sister’s history. You do not overeat simply any food, but you surround eating itself with taboos, so that it must be “pure food,” “good food,” to your way of thinking. And there are foods that you will eat and foods that you will not eat, and you project moral implications upon the foods. Some foods are “good,” to your way of thinking, and some foods are “bad.” To you this does not necessarily or alone mean they are good for the body or bad for the body, but in themselves you give them moral characteristics as you would people. So that beneath the whole attitude is the idea: “This is an evil food,” and be shunned as you would shun an evil person, within that framework of thought.

One small point. You have been punishing yourself quite often in the way in which you approach the medical experience. The idea of an operation, on the one hand, frightens you. On the other hand, you feel it is “just punishment for these ears of mine that will not work.” The same applied to the mouth. In that case, again, the attitudes cause your reaction.

You are not to begin these experiments that I’ve suggested with the idea that “Well, I must hurry up.”