“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

How can you stay healthy? How can you get rid of any illnesses you might have? Exactly what is the connection between your state of mind and your health? Seth’s ideas on this subject have been of great value to Rob and me, and to everyone who has come in contact with them. We have put his concepts to work in our own lives, and sometimes both of us wonder how we managed daily life before we understood the close relationship between thoughts, emotions, and health.

She always began with one of her fantastically funny sarcastic tales about someone she knew. She had an uncanny ability to sense people’s weak points and make fun of them. For all of that, when she was not sick she had a fine vitality, and a keen, native shrewdness. We played a sort of game: I liked her, but I wasn’t going to be besieged by a barrage of negative thoughts and pessimism for an hour, no matter how wittily presented—and she knew it. The worse part was that she really was funny and it was hard as the devil not to laugh at her, even when I knew I shouldn’t. And she knew this, too. So she would try to see how far she could go before I would call her on it and begin a “mini-lecture,” pointing out that her attitude toward other people was largely responsible for her difficulties.

Remember what I said earlier, that we form physical reality as a replica of our inner ideas. This is a major premise of the Seth Material. Joan literally disliked everyone with few exceptions. She was convinced, furthermore, that she was unliked and unlikable. She felt persecuted, sure that people were talking or gossiping about her when her back was turned—because this was precisely what she did. Daily life contained all kinds of threats for her, and she kept her nervous system in a constant state of stress. Her body defenses were lowered. She was tired of the constant battle, never realizing that much of the war was one-sided and unwarranted. She projected her ideas of reality outward, and they literally led her to destruction.

Yet she had been warned. Two years before her death she asked to attend a regular Seth session. Seth was quite serious and not as jovial as usual, and at the time I thought that he was being rather hard on her. Now I see that he was trying to impress her with the necessity of changing her attitudes and reactions. He stated his ideas on health as clearly and directly as possible, dealing with their practical application. I can almost see Joan sitting there, legs crossed, before the session. If she had been able to follow his advice, I am convinced she would be alive and well today. I am also sure that readers who understand and follow Seth’s ideas on health will find their own greatly improved.

“You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination,” he said, “for you allow your imagination too full a reign. If you read our early material, you will see that your environment and the conditions of your life at any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. You form physical materializations of these realities within your own mind.

“If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health, or desperate loneliness, these will be automatically materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them reality in physical terms. If you would have good health, then you must imagine this as vividly as in fear you imagine the opposite.

“You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see. Quite literally you see what you want to see; and you see your own thoughts and emotional attitudes materialized in physical form. If changes are to occur, they must be mental and psychic changes. These will be reflected in your environment. Negative, distrustful, fearful, or degrading attitudes toward anyone work against the self.”

“These mass suggestions include not only those given to him by others, both verbally and telepathically, but also those he has given to himself, both in the waking and dream states. If an individual is in a state of despondency, this is because he has already become prey to negative suggestions of his own and others. Now if you see him and think that he looks miserable”—Seth looked at Joan sharply—“or that he is an incurable drunk, then these suggestions are picked up by him subconsciously, though you have not spoken a word. And in his already weakened condition they will be accepted and acted upon.

“There are obviously ways in which you mold your own conditions, protect yourself from your own negative suggestions and those of others. You must learn to erase a negative thought or picture by replacing it with its opposite.

“You should tell yourself frequently, ‘I will only react to constructive suggestions,’ for this gives you some protection against your own negative thoughts and those of others. A negative thought if not erased will almost certainly result in a negative condition: a momentary despondency, a headache, according to the intensity of the thought.

It does not do to repress negative thoughts, such as fears, angers, or resentments. In other sessions Seth makes it clear that these should be recognized and faced and then replaced.

Repression has been one of my own habits, particularly after I learned how destructive negative thoughts can be. At first I went overboard, or tried to. I’d catch myself thinking a resentful thought about a particular person or situation and I’d almost recoil, “Wow, that’s a terrible thing to think,” I’d say to myself.

“If I direct an aggressive thought toward someone, then it can hurt them.” I said to Rob. “If I bury it, it can hurt me and emerge as physical symptoms of some kind. So will you please ask Seth in our next session what he suggests?” In this one session Seth explained the difference between repression and the correct approach.

“This is the difference between repression and positive action. In repression the resentment is shoved beneath and ignored. With our method it is recognized, imaginatively plucked out as being undesirable, and replaced by the thought of peace and constructive energy.” (Seth has frequently cautioned me against repressing aggressions out of fear of them. Rob says that it is quite funny—to him!—when Seth, speaking through me, takes me to task in this way. His suggestions have always been excellent, however.)

Later he made a very good point: “If desire for health leads instead to an emphasis upon symptoms to be overcome, you would be better off to avoid all thoughts of health or illness and concentrate in other directions, such as work. Such an emphasis can lead to a focus upon obstacles that stand in the way, and this reinforces the negative condition.”

Seth always says that life is abundant, vigorous, and strong. Each of us has our own defenses against negative suggestions, and we should trust in our own immunity. People react to negative suggestions only when their own frame of mind is negative. Then we close ourselves off from the constructive energies we need.

Now Seth, through my eyes, stared around the room. Someone picked my glasses up and put them on the coffee table. (As I mentioned before, when Seth comes through, he always takes my glasses off, and often flings them rather grandly upon the rug.) The lights were on, as always. He faced the group and said emphatically, “You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You have emotions. You have thoughts as you have eggs for breakfast, but you are not the eggs, and you are not your emotions. You are as independent of your thoughts and emotions as you are of the bacon and eggs. You use the bacon and eggs in your physical composition, and you use your thoughts and emotions in your mental composition. Surely you do not identify with a piece of bacon? Then do not identify with your thoughts and emotions. When you set up barriers and doors, then you enclose emotions within you ... as if you stored up tons of bacon in your refrigerator and then wondered why there was room for nothing else.”

“Unifying principles are groups of actions about which the personality forms itself at any given time. These usually change in a relatively smooth fashion when action is allowed to flow unimpeded. [See how this ties in with Seth’s advice to the students on the value of spontaneity and the difficulties of repression.] These impediments [illnesses] may sometimes then preserve the integrity of the whole psychological system and point out the existence of inner psychic problems. Illness is a portion of the action of which personality is composed and therefore it is purposeful, and cannot be considered as an alien force that invades personality from without. . . .

I’d read about such instances, but I have to admit that I thought they were highly imaginative accounts until I found myself guiding Miss C. The point is that she was so frightened of death, she didn’t realize it was all over. Since her physical body was quite dead, she was in her astral body; yet she was acting confused, and her mind was still unclear, as if she still had hardening of the arteries.

According to Seth, during our reincarnational existences we are to realize that we project our thoughts and emotions outward to form reality. When you realize, for example, that ill health is the projection of distorted ideas outward onto the body, then you work to clear up the inner problems. This realization can cure even illnesses that are related to past lives. Since Seth says these existences are actually lived spontaneously, then these “parallel” selves exist in us now, and we can reach them through therapy.

Robert Butts’ portrait of Seth. Two of Jane’s students have also visualized Seth in this form. (Robert Butts)