“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

SUGGESTION AND HEALTH

— and we will resume dictation, with a new chapter, to be called: “Suggestion and Health.”

Suggestions are usually statements directed toward a particular action or hypothesis. To a large extent, suggestions are tied into conscious thought processes, following the dictates of reason. For example: “If thus and thus be so, then thus and thus must follow.” There is no magic connected with suggestions — but repeated often enough, and believed in fervently, such suggestions do indeed take on a deeply habitual nature. They are no longer examined, but taken for literal truth.

(Long pause.) They are then handed over to the more automatic levels of personality, where they trigger the specific actions that are so strongly implied. Many such suggestions are “old-hat idioms.” They belong to the past, and again they escape the questioning and examination that are usually given to new ideas. Period.

These suggestions may be remarkably long-standing, therefore, and consist of beliefs received in childhood. Period. Accepted now in the present, noncritically, they may still affect health and well-being. Such suggestions can be beneficial and supportive, or negative and detrimental. Here are some examples that should be quite familiar to many people. They consist of suggestions given to children:

These suggestions and others like them are often given to children by their parents with the best of intentions. When they are young, the offspring will accept some such suggestions uncritically, coming as they do from a revered adult, so that the suggestions are almost interpreted as commands.

A suggestion like: “If you go swimming too soon after lunch, you will drown,” is extremely dangerous, for it predicts behavior of a disastrous nature that would follow almost automatically after the first act is performed. Obviously, children who go into the water right after eating do not all drown. The suggestion itself can lead to all kinds of nervous symptoms, however — panics, or stomach cramps — that can persist well into adulthood.

Such suggestions can be removed, as we will explain shortly.

(4:47.) There are other kinds of suggestions that involve identification. A child may be told: “You are just like your mother; she was always nervous and moody.” Or: “You are fat because your father was fat.”