“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. There are two strong aspects in your personality. One having to do with the reason why you entered the service; a desire for order; a desire for excitement, but excitement within an ordered sequence. There is also, in this same respect, an organizational aspect to your personality that is not now being used to advantage, and therefore can have negative consequences. You like to organize things and people. It is in this regard that you found the presence of your husband distracting when the two of you moved. Do you follow me?

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.

I am simply pointing out certain characteristics. You carry grudges, and you have carried one, several, concerning your husband for some time. In the meantime, he has changed.

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.

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.

Now some people do not like to look at unpleasant objects or sights, but very few of them would stop using their vision and give up the good sights so that they would not see bad ones. Yet this is what you are doing in your present course. Give us a moment.

(Note: In one of the breaks, I noticed two or three candles that were on Jane’s coffee table. I said I was glad that candles were “in,” because I loved to light them, and the few times I did so, at birthday parties or Christmas, Jim always got upset, mentioning the fire hazard—even when we had guests for dinner.)

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.

This is so that you will not enjoy your one indulgence overmuch!

The book that you bought, Psycho-Cybernetics, and the other one—both of these are good for you. But do not simply read them. Use them. Each book approaches various problems from different viewpoints. But together they will be of great help. Since you yourself began these reactions and originated them, you yourself can change them. And you can change them as of this moment.

If you do not trust your emotions, then you can no longer trust your joy. And if you try to hide your fear, then, you automatically hide your joy. Once you begin to inhibit emotions, the practice spreads like a plague, until all emotion must be inhibited, lest the one thing that you fear show its face.

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.

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.

([Mary:] “Yeah. I just didn’t know what to tell the doctor. ‘Cause he might want a statement of when I would get an operation, and I don’t—I haven’t made up my mind if I want one or not, yet.”)