“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

She was in her early thirties, with a good job, but she looked down on all of the other employees. Her marriage had ended in divorce before she moved here, and while she was always talking about getting married again, she had a great distrust of men. I think she really hated them. She didn’t think much better of women, yet at times she could be very warmhearted. She took a liking to Rob and myself, and often we would sit, she and I at this same table where I’m writing this book, and chat.

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.

Emotionally, she went from exaggerated heights to exaggerated lows. Her age bothered her; she was certain that “life would be over by the time you reach forty”—and for her it was, by several years. Yet we were all astonished to hear of her death. Even though we realized that she was literally making herself sick, we had no idea that she was “sick to death.”

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.

“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.

We had a short break, and Joan continued to complain of her friend’s drinking habits, how they only added to her own nervousness. She was certain that if she didn’t have this to contend with, her health would return. Quite vehemently, she set about blaming her friend for almost all of her problems. When Seth resumed, he was even more serious than before.

“Another example: A very industrious individual thinks the majority of men are lazy and good for nothing. No one would ever think of calling him lazy or good for nothing, yet this may be precisely his own subconscious picture of himself, against which he drives himself constantly. And all of this without his realizing his basic concept of himself, and without recognizing that he projects his feared weaknesses outward unto others.

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.”

Again, Seth is not suggesting we repress emotion. Spontaneity, above all, is the rule. If we were truly spontaneous, Seth says, we wouldn’t need to worry about positive suggestions because our health would be normally maintained.

“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’?

“And who, I ask you, would listen? For in the miraculous spontaneity of the sun, there is discipline that utterly escapes you, and a knowledge beyond any that we know. And in the spontaneous playing of the bees from flower to flower, there is a discipline beyond any that you know, and laws that follow their own knowledge, and joy that is beyond command. For true discipline, you see, is found only in spontaneity. Spontaneity knows its own order.”

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.”

“The complicated human personality with its physical structure has evolved, along with some other structures, a highly differentiated ‘I’ consciousness [the ego, in other words], whose very nature is such that it attempts to preserve the apparent boundaries of identity. To do so it chooses between actions. But beneath this sophisticated gestalt are the simpler foundations of its being, and indeed the very acceptance of all stimuli without which identity would be impossible.

“Without this acquiescence to even painful stimuli, the structure would never maintain itself, for the atoms and molecules within it constantly accept such stimuli, and joyfully suffer even their own destruction. Being aware of their identity within all action, and not having the complicated ‘I’ structure, there is no reason for them to fear destruction. They are aware of themselves as a part of action.

“Now all of this is basic knowledge if you would understand why the personality accepts even an impeding action such as illness despite the ego’s resistence to pain.”

“You cannot pervert them by trying to force them to serve purposes that you have set up as a condition of existence. You must live in the faith that your purpose is, and will be fulfilled, is being fulfilled. You must live in the faith that you have such a purpose and meaning, or you would not be here.

“If you are in poor physical shape, this does not mean that you are an evil person. Let us clear that up. It means that you have a block in that particular area in which you are unable to utilize energy constructively. … Theoretically, if you are using energy the way you should, you would be in excellent health and filled with abundance. Various kinds of lacks can show up in many ways, however.

“The human being does not erupt into existence at birth and laboriously then begin its first attempt to gain experience. If this were the case, you would still be back in the Stone Age.”