“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.

And her difficulties were illnesses—of such variety and vigor that I think it was impossible even for her to recount what had afflicted her in any one year. Some were serious, and she had several operations. She picked up every infection in vogue, and many that weren’t. She went from doctor to doctor and always with quite definite and often appalling physical symptions. Her diet was greatly restricted, and her illnesses began to become more and more severe.

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.

“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 create your own difficulties. This is true for each individual. The inner psychological state is projected outward, gaining physical reality—and this regardless of the nature of the psychological state. … The rules apply to everyone. You can use them for your own benefit and change your own conditions once you realize what they are.

“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.”

“You have been examining others, rather than yourself. What you see in others is the materialization—the projection of what you think you are—not necessarily, however, of what you are. For example, if others seem deceitful to you, it is because you deceive yourself, and then project this outward upon others.

“These are examples, now. If an individual sees only evil and desolation in the physical world, it is because he is obsessed with evil and desolation and projects them outward, and closes his eyes to all else. If you want to know what you think of yourself, then ask yourself what you think of others, and you will find your answer.

“True self-knowledge is indispensable for health or vitality. The recognition of the truth about the self simply means that you must first discover what you think about yourself, subconsciously. If it is a good image, build upon it. If it is a poor one, recognize it as only the opinion you have held of yourself and not as an absolute state.”

“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.

He said to “the Dean,” “Why is it so difficult for you to learn what freedom is?”

“That is indeed your interpretation,” Seth said, “and this is because you set demands. Now I ask you, how far do you think a flower would get if in the morning it turned its face toward the sky and said, ‘I demand the sun. And now I need rain. So I demand it. And I demand bees to come and take my pollen. I demand, therefore, that the sun shall shine for a certain number of hours, and that the rain shall pour for a certain number of hours . . . and that the bees come— bees A, B, C, D, and E, for I shall accept no other bees to come. I demand that discipline operate, and that the soil shall follow my command. But I do not allow the soil any spontaneity of its own. And I do not allow the sun any spontaneity of its own. And I do not agree that the sun knows what it is doing. I demand that all these things follow my ideas of discipline’?

Again, Seth stared at “the Dean,” but now he spoke to the others in the group. “In the spontaneous working of your nervous system, what do we find? We see here the head of ‘the Dean’ that rests upon his shoulders, and the intellect that demands discipline. And yet all of this rests upon the spontaneous workings of the inner self, and the nervous system of which the intellect knows little. And without that spontaneous discipline, there would be no ego to sit upon the shoulders and demand discipline. . . . Now that I have proven how jovial I am, you may all take a break.”

He also has some fascinating comments on the relationship of various kinds of symptoms to the inner problems involved. “Do not forget that you are a part of the inner self. It is not using you. You are the portion of it that experiences physical reality. Now, physical illnesses that are not critical but observable—that do not involve, say, loss of a limb or organ— generally represent problems that are in the process of being solved, problems that are “out in the open.’

As Seth makes clear in other sessions, the symptoms in such cases are themselves part of the healing process. What we are supposed to do, then, is change our mental attitude, search ourselves for the inner problem represented by the symptoms, and measure our progress as the symptoms subside.

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.

“Once you wholeheartedly accept life on life’s terms, then you may indeed get what you are after, but not while you insist upon it as a condition for continued existence. … Your own purpose will make life a daily joy when you let your conditions go. You forget what you do have—health and vitality. You forget your intellect and intuitions. You forget what blessings are yours.

But exactly what is good health? In a recent class session, our “Dean” asked Seth.

“You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will. It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, you will not change the nature of reincarnation one iota.”

“Karma presents the opportunity for development. It enables the individual to enlarge understanding through experience, to fill in gaps of ignorance, to do what should be done. Free will is always involved.”