Mike's commentary · The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 16

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the parts Mike read aloud).

Reading Guide

This chapter discusses natural hypnosis and trance states, pointing out that physical life is an illusion formed by sensory focus, and that conscious beliefs are accepted by the unconscious by default and influence the body and experience. A daily self-hypnosis practice of five to ten minutes consists of concentrating on and repeating one desired sentence, and then letting it go once done. It then analyzes how social suggestions such as medicine, cancer propaganda, medical insurance, retirement age, and health foods reinforce beliefs in illness and aging, and uses weight loss and weight gain as examples to show that bodily states are conditioned by beliefs, and that change must begin with beliefs in the present moment.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Physical life is a trance state; reality is only the picture displayed by the senses, and attention is concentrated because of trust in the senses.
• Conscious beliefs are accepted by default by the unconscious, and they influence the nerves, the cells, and daily experience.
• Repeating one desired sentence with concentration for five to ten minutes every day can implant a new belief; after doing it, do not dwell on it any further.
• Western medicine, cancer propaganda, medical insurance, retirement age, and health foods often reinforce beliefs in illness and aging through negative suggestion.
• Physical conditions such as losing weight or gaining weight are the results of self-hypnotic conditioning; changing the result must begin with changing the present belief.

Main Text

We continue with the first part of our reading of Chapter 16 of the Seth book The Nature of Personal Reality, "Natural Hypnosis: A Trance State Is a Trance State Is a Trance State." This chapter follows directly from the second half of Chapter 15.

Seth said we would continue, and at that point Rob said "sixteen," and Seth laughed and said, Chapter 16, titled "Natural Hypnosis: A Trance State Is a Trance State Is a Trance State." What is a trance state? It is the state of hypnosis, the state of being hypnotized; we call it a trance state. So the title of Chapter 16 is about hypnosis: natural hypnosis and the trance state.

This title is actually imitating a famous line by a writer, "rose is a rose is a rose¹." This is actually what we now call, in internet slang, "important things should be said three times." "Important things should be said three times" has an origin, and its root is right here; it was not invented by internet slang. If you want to find its source, it is right here.

What Is Behind Reality, Really

What does Seth say in this chapter? He says:

What is the substance behind reality? Is our real life an illusion? Is there some definite and solid reality, and you yourself are only a shadow within it?

What is behind reality, really? Is there a definite, solid reality, and we are only shadows within it?

He says:

Your reality is the result of an illusion. If you say it that way, you mean that it is only the picture your senses show you, and that is indeed the case.

Your reality is actually the result of an illusion. The reality you think you have is only the picture your senses show you. The world you think you have is all perceived through your senses -- what your eyes see, what your hands touch, what your nose smells, what your mouth tastes, what your body feels through touch -- these physical sensory feelings give you a cognition of the world around you. If you understand it this way, he says that is indeed the case: the reality you think you have is an illusion.

He says:

Of course, in essence, your existence is through sensory perception.

Fundamentally, that is how it is. Your cognition of existence lies in your sensory perception. If you do not understand this sentence, let us imagine a scenario: if you now had no vision, were blind, could not hear, could not speak, and also had no sense of touch, taste, or smell -- if you had no sensations at all -- could you still be aware of your own existence?

Physical Life Is a Trance State

If you put it that way:

Physical life is a "trance" state, because the focus of its attention is largely concentrated through the senses' trust in the perceived reality.

Why is it called a hypnotic state? Because our senses are all concentrated by this trust in reality -- by our trust in the surrounding environment. We are deeply convinced of the environment we are in, so your focus, your point of attention, your awareness, are all on your surrounding environment. The surrounding environment is like something you pay excessive attention to, are obsessed with, or firmly believe in, and so you become hypnotized.

But:

That experience is the image that reality now gives you. Therefore, in another way of speaking, life on earth is one version of reality.

Our life on earth is actually another version of true reality -- not the whole of reality, not all of reality, just a part, just one version, just one part of it.

Earth life itself is one avenue through which you perceive reality. In order to explore that experience, you focus your attention upon it, and use all other nonphysical abilities as aids and adjuncts.

What he means is that when we want to experience that experience -- the experience in physical life -- we focus our attention on this physical plane, on this reality, and use all other nonmaterial, nonphysical abilities -- that is, those inner abilities of ours, the abilities of energy, the abilities of belief -- as aids and adjuncts, to help you achieve it, to help you experience it.

Your Conscious Beliefs Are Important

Your hypnotic nerves and the cells within your body, because they will reflect according to your expectations. And the beliefs of your conscious mind are, to some extent, followed by all parts of yourself.

Your hypnotic nerves all reflect according to what you expect. The beliefs of your conscious mind, remember, are followed by all parts, down to the smallest atoms and molecules. The major events of your life, your interactions with other people, even the inertial workings of the most minute physical events within your body, all follow your conscious beliefs. So your conscious beliefs are very important.

He says once again:

If you are ill, you may say, "I did not want to be ill." If you are poor, you say, "I did not want to be poor." Or if you are unloved, you say, "I did not want to be lonely and alone." But for your own reasons, you began to believe in illness more than health, to believe in poverty more than abundance, to believe in loneliness more than intimacy.

You may have accepted some of these ideas from your parents, and their influence may still surround you. Or you may have changed your beliefs in one particular area of life. But if you make use of the power to act in the "present," each one can be changed.

Some people may have already changed their beliefs in life, replacing the beliefs they received from their parents in childhood, or they may have already changed them in certain areas. But he says, if you can make use of the power to act in the present, which is the point of power, then in fact every belief can be changed, and whatever you want to change can be changed—I mean beliefs.

He is not saying that every one of you must or should be healthy, intelligent, and wealthy. He is not telling everyone to change their beliefs to these. He is only speaking to those who have things in their lives that they are dissatisfied with. If you feel quite satisfied, then there is nothing more to say; those who are willing to experience, willing to take the present conditions of life as the experience and lessons of this lifetime, they also do not need to change their beliefs.

Self-Hypnosis and Habitual Thinking

The suggestions you give yourself operate just like beliefs and are reflected in your experience. So in our lives, many times we are giving ourselves suggestions, giving ourselves hypnosis.

Some of you are simply mentally lazy -- just lazy. Many of us are physically forced not to be lazy, working like robots, but mentally we are very lazy and do not consciously examine the material we receive.

Many people habitually deny negative opinions that come from others. Many people are unwilling to accept negative suggestions from others, pushing all negative things away and desperately defending positive, affirmative beliefs. In essence, the reason they do this is that they are completely convinced that the power of negative beliefs is stronger than that of beneficial ones. In our daily lives, we often say we should stay away from negative things and negative people, and not accept those negative beliefs. The reason we do this is that deep down we actually know that the influence of these negative things on us may be even stronger than that of positive forces, so we are afraid to avoid them and stay away from those negative people with negative emotions and negative energy.

Everyone finds habitual thought patterns in their own lives -- thought patterns without reflection, a very lazy kind of thought pattern. That pattern will be supported by the behavior that follows from it, and it is a conditioned behavior. Using this habitual pattern, you will continue to reinforce negative views. Because habitual thinking brings habitual action, and habitual action brings habitual reinforcement, making you even more insistent on your belief: "I am just this kind of person. Look, I even did such things. If I were not this kind of person, how could I do such things?"

Focusing on it and excluding contradictory material means you are too focused on this negative thought pattern, and you have excluded all the positive things that do not conflict with it. Thus through natural hypnosis, you bring these bad, negative things into your experience.

When You Are Fully Focused, You Are Both the Hypnotist and the One Being Hypnotized

Many people think hypnosis has great power. Yet whenever another person focuses their full attention on you, you are a hypnotist. What he means is, the hypnotist is not actually that powerful; it is only because the person being hypnotized concentrates their full attention on him. For example, if he shows you a swinging pocket watch, a moving finger, or whatever object it may be, and has you focus your attention on it, he can already put you under hypnosis. The reverse is also true: if someone else is the object of your full attention, then you are the hypnotist, and you can hypnotize that person.

You will find this situation is very common in the process of falling in love — when a boy and a girl are in a state of romantic love, they are often hypnotized by each other. That is why people say that girls in love have an IQ of zero, or even below zero; the same goes for many boys — boys in love also have an IQ of zero.

You find that when you are fully focused, you are simultaneously the hypnotist and the one being hypnotized. You are always giving yourself "post-hypnotic" suggestions — especially when you project the present situation into the future. We often do this: project the present situation into the future, and you think, "My life is like this now, so what will the future be like? Oh, it won't be too good, since things are already like this now" — if life continues to develop the way it is now, the future will be nothing more than this.

What does he want us to remember? In fact, all of this simply follows the natural workings of the psyche. He wants you to drop the idea of treating hypnosis as "magic." When you are in this hypnotized state, being both the hypnotist and the one hypnotized toward yourself, you project your present into the future — this is not right. But you should know that this is not some kind of magic; this itself is simply the result of following the natural workings of your psyche.

A Five-to-Ten-Minute Exercise

So at most five or ten minutes a day, using natural hypnosis as a method for accepting the new beliefs you want:

During that time, concentrate as vividly as possible on that one sentence. Repeat it again and again, and at the same time focus your mind upon it. Try to feel the sentence in any way possible, that is, do not let stray thoughts come in. And if your mind insists on running around, then direct the imagery of your mind along the same line as your statement.

He is explaining how to do this five-minute self-hypnosis method. He already said earlier that you only need to spend five minutes a day training yourself to implant the correct beliefs you want into yourself. How do you implant them? The method is just this simple.

This exercise is very simple. He says you must do it five to ten minutes every day, and you must not exceed ten minutes. Do not make it too long, because if it is too long you cannot concentrate. For all beginners, it is impossible to sustain that concentration for a longer period of time. Five minutes is enough, and if you feel it is not enough, at most do eight minutes, but do not do it for too long.

Many people who have done the 21-Day Abundance Journey meditation now understand why that meditation practice was designed to be relatively short, and not designed to be too long. The reason is right here. In that program, are you not asked to focus on just one sentence each day? That mantra is there to gather your mind back during meditation; when you meditate, it asks you to meditate on that day's sentence, and each day there is one sentence for you to think about. That mantra is what helps pull you back when your thoughts are running around and you cannot concentrate.

Five to ten minutes a day is enough. That repetition, whether spoken aloud or repeated mentally, is very important. Repeating it silently in your mind and speaking it aloud are both very important. You might say, "Can I not repeat it, and just keep my mind blank?" No, you must repeat it, you must actually voice it. Why?

Because the act of repeating, whether mentally or actually spoken aloud, activates a biological pattern. What is meant by a biological pattern? In Chapter Seven, "The Flesh and Blood," it says that the entire invisible body within your body is composed of those inaudible sounds. And this sound you repeat silently and the sound you speak aloud have a tremendous effect on those biological, inaudible sounds; it activates the biological pattern, and also reflects that pattern.

He says do not use force. This exercise should not be done together with the earlier exercise given about the point of power—one should not collide with the other, they are different—and should be done at a different time of day. Earlier he gave an exercise on how to train your point of power.

However, during that period, while doing this five-to-ten-minute exercise, you must remember that you are looking into the new belief by treating the present as the point of power. This present moment of yours, these five minutes, these ten minutes, is itself a point of power; use this viewpoint to look at your new belief. And remember that this will definitely be materialized—believe that these new beliefs of yours, under the action of your present point of power, will definitely be materialized, will definitely be manifested.

After this exercise is finished, do not "dwell" on it, do not keep thinking about it, do not think about it anymore. You have already used a condensed form of natural hypnosis—very simple, very effective—and have already reinforced it. Your inner energy will automatically activate and mobilize itself; you do not need to manage it.

Give Yourself Three Days

He suggests you try it. Many people are skeptical, so you can take one thing and test it in practice. Whatever you want to experiment with, find the appropriate wording for your message -- find a particular belief, find a certain sentence.

You need at least three days before you can know through its results whether it works. Give yourself three days, and after three days see whether this five-to-ten-minute exercise actually works. If after three days it has not worked, you can consider whether the sentence or the wording is not quite right, or whether you have no feeling for it. Then change the phrasing and wording -- that is, the sentence, the word, the phrase that you repeat silently or aloud. When the feeling of that sentence is right for you, when you feel very right about the sentence of the new belief you want to actualize, then continue using it.

Apart from that, your attention should be completely relaxed. Because this takes time. You may experience dramatic results immediately; some people manifest it the very next day, and some people can manifest it the same day. But whether you experience results immediately or not, you must continue the practice. You cannot say, "Oh, I just thought about it and it worked that very day, and it worked the next day, so I do not need to practice anymore" -- no. You do not need to doubt the power of the effect itself, the power of manifestation. You are simply, in this practice of manifestation with yourself, continually exploring to find a way that suits you -- what words, what phrasing, what sentences work for you and produce better results. Explore more in this regard.

You must give your inner channels a new pattern, and you will also have a feeling for this new pattern. You will have a sense of it, and that can serve as your own personal indicator; you can feel it yourself.

You do not need to practice for more than ten minutes. In fact, many people will find it difficult to go beyond ten minutes, because spending a longer time only reinforces the difficulties involved.

So in this part, Seth explains in detail the method and specific points of attention for the five-to-ten-minute self-hypnosis exercise, very meticulously.

Session 659

Natural Hypnosis Is the Unconscious Defaulting to Conscious Beliefs

This session's content is very short, so we will cover it together with the next one. The next session is Session 659 of the book, the class on Wednesday evening, April 25, 1973.

Natural hypnosis is the unconscious defaulting to conscious beliefs.

What is called natural hypnosis is simply the kind of hypnosis we undergo every day in ordinary life. What is it? It is the unconscious defaulting to conscious beliefs. In our daily lives, this is exactly what we are doing -- using conscious beliefs to influence your unconscious, and the unconscious automatically defaults to and accepts your conscious beliefs.

During a period of mental concentration, all stray thoughts are dismissed. The desired concept is then implanted. This is quite normal; during hypnosis a new concept is implanted.

Yet normal life undergoes the same process. In our ordinary lives, it is just the same as hypnosis. The main area of concentration then controls your experience in both biological and psychic terms. In life, the area you concentrate on mentally controls your experience in both biological and psychic terms. According to the beliefs you concentrate on, it controls your experience in both respects -- whether biological experience, physical experience, or your experience of psychic feeling, such as emotional experience, all are influenced by the area of your mental concentration. Whatever you concentrate on, and whatever beliefs you use to concentrate there, brings about that influence and that experience.

An Example of a Positive Belief

Let us take a simple example: a positive belief instilled in childhood. Say, as a child a person was praised for being good-looking and having well-proportioned features. In childhood, most children receive this kind of praise from their parents -- parents look at their own children and see them as beautiful no matter what. He was also praised for having a likable personality.

This idea took root. And afterward this person's actions in all areas conformed to this belief. But a group of secondary beliefs also grew up around this main belief.

This person's belief in personal value also drew to it the belief in other people's personal value. Because other people showed our fortunate friend their best side, and his life constantly reinforced this idea. What does that mean? Because he held such a belief, his belief in personal value drew other people's belief in personal value to him as well. Those children would also automatically show their best side to this child.

Although he vaguely sensed that some people were kinder than others, and he could feel that, his direct experience allowed him to see the best parts in others and in himself. Because his own belief and the actual experience brought by that belief made him think that everyone should have this best side, he could see other people's strengths and merits in his actual experience.

Among the material or stimuli that did not match his concepts, a secondary issue -- he knew this did exist. Although he thought this way, material and stimuli that did not match his concepts also existed: not everyone was good-looking; there were also ugly people, and people with bad tempers, and not every one of his little friends was likable. He could also notice these bad things, but that was a secondary issue. He did not think there was nothing bad in the world; he knew there was, but he felt it did not personally apply to him. He realized that the issue was a fact for others -- for example, being ugly, which he did not care about at all and which did not apply to him, but he knew that for others it might really be ugly and might really trouble them.

He did not need to prove himself. Good-looking people do not need to prove themselves, so they can more easily accept their contemporaries fairly. Because in his heart he firmly believed that he was a very outstanding person, a very good person -- good-tempered, good-looking, well-built, perhaps also good at studying -- he did not need to deliberately pick at other people's faults or deliberately look at their shortcomings.

Perhaps in some areas, he understood that he was not good enough. In other respects, he was not good enough in every way -- for example, he might feel his math was not good enough and he always got his calculations wrong -- and he understood that too. But because he believed in his basic value and his overall perception of himself was good, he could also accept his shortcomings and regard them with equanimity, without feeling threatened. He would not think that being deficient in one area would be the end of him: so what if he was deficient -- for the most part, on the whole, I am good. He would be able to try to improve his situation -- if I am not good at something, I will go improve it -- but he would not knock himself down while improving. He would not deny all other aspects of himself just because of this one deficiency.

Beauty and Belief

In that sense, as far as appearance goes, if we take the features one by one -- nose, eyes, ears, and compare them -- he may not be much different from those who believe they are not attractive. But because his belief that he is handsome is so important to him, others will respond to it in the same way -- others will feel that he is handsome.

For example, a person can have great natural beauty, but that beauty is not obvious to others or to himself. The reason is that this person does not believe he possesses beauty, and this diminishes the beauty that is actually unrelated to him. Therefore that beauty really does become invisible.

Some girls are actually very beautiful, but because they themselves do not believe it, in every way they feel they are not very beautiful, so ordinarily they do not feel they are very beautiful people, and they do not care much about their outward image either, feeling they are just very ordinary girls. Over time, they really do become not that beautiful -- this is a very interesting thing, and you will find it in real life.

And those girls whose looks are plain, who have no particularly striking features or outstanding appearance, because they believe they are beautiful, see themselves as beautiful no matter how they look, and in every aspect of their outward image, bearing, and manner they believe they are beautiful. Over time, they give people a certain feeling: this girl really is beautiful. We are not talking about her specific features, but the overall feeling she gives you is beauty. Or when we praise a girl for having great presence, for being very charming, she is bound to have her own unique power of attraction, her own attractiveness.

Beliefs as Hypnotic Foci

Your beliefs act like hypnotic foci, reinforced through the normal inner "self-talk" in which you are all immersed. Our beliefs are like the hypnosis we give ourselves through self-talk, and being absorbed in it is equivalent to being unable to pull ourselves out—every day we brainwash ourselves, every day we hypnotize ourselves.

What is a belief, anyway? A belief is like the focus a hypnotist gives you—the hypnotist says, "Watch my hand, watch my watch," getting you to concentrate on some imagined place. And the way we ordinarily talk to ourselves, in that self-talk manner, is how we add hypnosis to ourselves. This inner "self-talk" is like hypnotic repetition—the hypnotist says, "When I count to a certain number, you will fall asleep," and it is just like that. In this case, you are your own hypnotist. In the example given earlier, the child who from a young age felt beautiful because of praise from parents or friends around them will, upon growing up, feel beautiful.

Very few people have only one main area of focus; most have many areas of focus, usually involving several. Our ordinary areas of focus are not limited to whether we are beautiful or not. But this does not mean—these represent the way you use energy. He says this example merely represents one way in which you use your energy. And in your actual life, you have many different areas, yet you use your energy in the same manner.

A person who takes their own worth for granted, a person with a sense of worth, does not need to doubt this point. The experiences that follow will also be natural—that is, experiences of being worthy come naturally, all by themselves. Because they never doubt that they are worthless; they believe they are worthy, so in their daily life, every experience confirms that they are worthy.

In many aspects of our lives, for those places where you are satisfied, you do not need to make further effort. Because your conscious thoughts and focus have brought about the results you like, and these results are already what the focus has brought. You do not need to spend too much time and energy on them anymore; just maintain them. It is only those places in life where you feel perplexed—where you think, "Why am I not doing well here? Why is my ability to earn money not enough?"—these are the places where you begin to doubt.

But here, natural hypnosis operates just as easily and naturally. In those places where you feel you are not good enough, it is likewise because hypnosis is operating naturally; your conscious thoughts automatically produce substantial effects, that is, material manifestation effects. Therefore in these areas, you must realize that you yourself are the hypnotist—it is you who made yourself feel inadequate; this was not given to you by someone else.

The unconscious accepts the commands given to it by the conscious mind; it accepts them automatically. You see, you must remember, it accepts them.

In every person's experience, there are some areas where they feel satisfied. However, when they discover places of dissatisfaction, they should ask themselves:

What are the commands I have issued within that particular range of experience?

Within that range where you are dissatisfied with yourself, what commands have you issued to yourself? What kind of hypnosis have you given yourself? The result seems not to follow your conscious wishes—at first you will feel, this is not going according to my conscious intent; I do not want to be poor, I do not want to be sick, so how did it turn out this way? But when you carefully ask yourself, you will discover that your experience does indeed follow your conscious beliefs. The two may be quite different—that is, what you want and what actually happens are quite different.

The Conflict Between Desire and Belief

You may desire health, you simply desire health, but secretly believe that your health is not good. This is very interesting. You will give yourself all sorts of reasons: for example, my parents have hereditary diseases, my uncles, my elders have hereditary diseases, so my body may not be very good either; or, I was born prematurely, I was a premature baby, so my natural constitution is not as good as others; or, I was sick once when I was young, and it may have left some root of illness behind. All sorts of reasons -- in any case, the suggestion you give yourself is that your health is actually not particularly good.

You may desire spiritual understanding, but believe that you have no value spiritually or psychically, or that you are dull. You want spiritual development, but believe you have no spirituality. You desire something opposite to your present beliefs, yet there is always conflict -- you want something completely opposite to your present beliefs, but in reality you will always find that the conditions are not ready, the timing is not ripe, and there are all sorts of obstacles and conflicts present.

Your beliefs will generate appropriate feelings and imaginings that match their characteristics. Because there is something that conflicts with your present belief, appropriate changes will appear to counter it. If you want health, but continually counter it with the present belief of "poor health," then this belief of "poor health" is established to fight against your desire for health.

You believe yourself to be in poor health -- that is a belief; you want health -- that is merely a desire. The inconsistency between belief and desire causes additional difficulties. We often say that "your resistance in this manifestation is enormous" -- resistance as in electrical resistance, the resistance value. The process of manifestation becomes additionally difficult. In such circumstances, you seem to be asking for the impossible, because your desire and your belief are not unified, but are separate and inconsistent, and that is impossible.

Right after the 21-day meditation, we followed up with a summary and exercise, which was to have you unify your desire and your belief. The word used at the time was consistency -- to be consistent with your own inner self, consistent with your inner beliefs, to bring desire and belief into alignment.

The Hypnotist and Authority

In formal hypnosis -- not the everyday self-hypnosis of daily life, but hypnosis given to you by a hypnotist -- there is an agreement between you and the hypnotist: for a little while, you are willing to accept his ideas about reality rather than your own. Since you went to him for hypnosis, you are willing, within a certain period of time, to accept his interpretation of reality and his control over you. If he tells you that there is a pink elephant in front of you, then you will see it and believe that it is there. The hypnotist says, "All right, a pink elephant is walking toward you," and under hypnosis you really do see that pink elephant, and you act according to his suggestions. He gives you some suggestions, asking you to perform a scene, and you seem to be inside it, like a character in a game, controlled by him.

If you are a good subject -- that is, someone who is easily hypnotized -- and your hypnotist is also a good practitioner, then if during hypnosis he tells you that you have been burned, your skin may actually blister².

Regarding this experiment, I think everyone has seen many psychology experiments. If you have not seen it, you can go search for it; this is a very classic experiment that has been verified countless times: blindfold a person, bring them into a deep hypnotic state, then tell them, "I am now placing a red-hot branding iron on your leg," and have them describe the process of the iron touching the skin. If the hypnotist's skill is high enough -- and you can add some sound effects, or not -- then a miraculous phenomenon will occur: your leg will actually develop blisters as if it had been scalded or burned. What branding iron? It is only a suggestion, but your body really does respond to the suggestion.

There are other suggestions as well, for example in some crime-scene cases: blindfold a person and tie them to a bed, take a piece of plastic and make a cut on their wrist, saying, "I have now cut your wrist open, and your blood is flowing out"³, while at the same time playing the sound of water running from a faucet, the drip-drip-drip sound, with a basin placed below to catch it. Tell them, "Your wrist has now been cut, your blood is slowly flowing out, and soon it will all drain away." In some cases that have occurred, the person may actually enter a state of death -- they really do feel that their blood has drained away. These are all very real. If you do not believe it, you can go look for cases about hypnosis; there are especially many.

You can perform bodily memories that you originally thought you were incapable of. All of this is because you voluntarily set certain beliefs aside for a time and allowed yourself to accept other beliefs. You are willing to accept the belief that you have been burned, and you believe that you have been burned.

The Conscious Mind Is Strengthened in Hypnosis

Unfortunately, because this suggestive language was considered necessary, people assumed that the conscious mind was hypnotized and that its activity temporarily stopped. We ordinary people think that being hypnotized means the conscious mind is hypnotized and conscious activity stops. Actually, it is exactly the opposite. The real situation is the reverse: the conscious mind is not stopped; rather, it is more focused and strengthened, but narrowed -- narrowed to a specific area, with all other stimuli cut off. So during hypnosis, do not be disturbed; you must be in a quiet environment, a comfortable environment, a relatively safe environment, with no other influences.

This intensity of conscious focus reduces obstructions, allowing information to reach the unconscious directly and then be put into practice. Many people say, "Can you give me a real-life example of thoughts creating reality?" This is one of the most typical examples: you are burned entirely because of your belief -- you believe you have been burned, and your skin really is burned.

How your inner workings operate is something many scientists cannot explain. Scientists still do not understand why, when a person is given the suggestion in consciousness that he has been burned, his skin reacts. How do the cells produce this kind of burn reaction? We used to think that a burn must have an external cause -- a branding iron or something hot that burned you. That is our ordinary understanding of the external world -- we think the external world causes our body's reactions, that the external world burns us and injures us.

Didn't Seth say it? No. Your body is a reflection of your beliefs; your body is a product of your beliefs. Here he gives this example again to re-emphasize -- of course, this passage is about hypnosis -- to remind you that in daily life, you are influenced by your consciousness to this very degree. It is just that ordinarily you are not aware of it, not conscious of these things.

However, the hypnotist is very important, and the importance lies in the fact that he plays the direct representative of authority. At this time, the hypnotist represents authority -- represents an authority over your consciousness.

In your terms, beliefs are initially received from your parents. As I mentioned earlier, in this life connected with mammalian experience, the hypnotist becomes a substitute for the parents. In this therapeutic case, a frightened person, because of the beliefs of your civilization, turns for help not to himself but to an authority figure.

In the growth process of us mammals, parents are our primary authority -- because we all have to live with our parents for a period of time and are fed and raised by them. When you are very young, your parents are your primary authority, your only authority. Earlier, in Chapter 4, Session 619, this issue was discussed: parents are the child's authority, and how your beliefs are instilled in you by your parents. So in this process you will understand that the hypnotist is just like your parents -- just like the authority your parents had over you when you were a child. He will instill his beliefs into you, and so you will accept his beliefs.

Primitive Hypnotic Healing

Even in primitive societies, shamans and other natural healers already understood that the point of power is in the present, and they used natural hypnosis as a method to help others concentrate their own energy. In primitive tribal societies, those witch doctors, shamans, or other natural healers—including those in our ancient Chinese medicine—all understood that the point of power is in the present, and they used natural hypnosis as a method to help others concentrate their own energy.

In that process of seeing a shaman for healing, there would always be certain specific gestures, dances, or other procedures. In rural China today, this kind of spirit-jumping is still popular for treating illness—some strange illnesses, when you get some strange illness, you need to be treated through this method.

All of these treatment methods are a kind of "shock treatment." This includes some present-day magical practices—peach-wood swords, setting up formations, having a ritual master say "drive this ghost out of the possessed body," and so on. What is the main function of all these? It is to scare the person being treated out of his habitual reactions—to scare him out of his patterns of thought, out of his mental inertia.

By giving that kind of shock, he is thereby focused—he is forced to focus on this present moment. During this stage of the ritual, during this process, he is forced to focus here. The resulting "loss of orientation"—in that dancing, with others putting on ghost masks, singing and dancing, all kinds of rituals and shocks—if you have ever encountered one of those spirit-jumpers, you know that he has bells in his hands, and the bells are accompanied by drums. Extremely noisy, directly scattering all of your attention, dissolving your habitual thinking.

In the last episode we talked about "shock treatment." Spirit-jumping, shamanic healing, exorcising ghosts and driving out evil—these processes all use extreme noise, dance, and ritual to scare the person being treated out of his habitual thought patterns, forcing him to focus on this present moment. Surrounded by those bells, drumbeats, and ghost masks, your original framework of beliefs is shaken loose, or even removed. At that very moment, the shaman or healer immediately embeds the new belief that he thinks the person needs, pouring in a new fixation—"your ghost has already left," "I drove it out," "look, it ran out through the window." Whether he uses performance or imagery, his painstaking intention is to make you believe this, to bring you out of the old state. At that point, you are healed.

Within this scope, it will also involve the accompanying clusters of concepts that follow the healer's own concepts. What is meant by clusters of concepts? In our society, when hypnosis is mentioned, it often involves "regression"—the patient often has to remember and re-experience a past traumatic experience. The hypnotist will take you back with him, and he will tell you that your current problem—note that here he uses the word "appears"—stems from some past event, some traumatic experience. If both the hypnotist and the subject accept this cause, then progress is made on that level. Both sides agree that your current state is caused by some childhood trauma, and so they return to that childhood trauma, and the hypnotist tells you: either erase this memory, or tell you that it actually was not a trauma, or that it is already in the past. In any case, he will make you believe that your problem today was caused by a past trauma, and now we can change it. The hypnotist takes you through that process again, while implanting a new belief—at that time you were a child, and you could not handle such a difficulty, but now you are an adult, and you can understand what your parents' divorce was about. Whatever the specific situation, he simply makes you believe this. Once you believe it, your condition will really change. So many people do improve after receiving hypnotherapy.

However, the hypnotist will also bring some problems due to the limitations of his own understanding and cognition. He has not yet reached that state—you are the point of power right now, and you do not need to go back and look in order to change the past. Actually, the method he uses is consistent with Seth's ideas, except that he uses the more traditional theory of hypnosis to explain it.

If the concepts of this culture include voodoo—voodoo means cursing, sorcery, similar to raising child spirits in Thailand, making little figurines—then people will view the entire treatment within that framework. He will discover a curse: the reason you are in this state today is because someone cast a spell on you at some point. Then the doctor can use the present point of power to reverse it: I have lifted your curse, I have broken your spell using an opposite method. These are all normal ways of operating.

However, what has been said above applies equally outside of formal hypnosis, that is, to those moments in our daily lives when we are not under the operation of a hypnotist. Seth is now about to attack Western medicine. He says:

From my viewpoint, I have given the greatest understanding and sympathy.

This is said very politely. What he says next, in his original words, is:

Let me say that Western medicine itself and its own methods are the most uncivilized design of hypnosis.

That is what we now call Western medicine—it is the most uncivilized design of hypnosis, even worse than those ancient shamans and spirit-jumping healers. Why? He says:

The most highly educated Western doctor, if he thinks of a primitive witch doctor, in a grass hut, with a chicken being sacrificed, does not feel total horror and panic.

A chicken dies, and that is that. But when a woman gets breast cancer, the doctor sacrifices both of her breasts to the cancer, yet considers this a very scientific and unavoidable procedure. The doctor simply cannot see any other way, and unfortunately the patient likewise cannot see any other way. The main treatment for breast cancer now is mastectomy—some have one side removed, some have both sides removed—because the doctor will tell you that even if it is not there now, it will spread later, the cancer cells will metastasize. A few years ago there was a news report about a female celebrity who did genetic sequencing tests. Her mother had had breast cancer, and her probability of getting breast cancer was over sixty percent, so before she even got breast cancer, she preemptively had her breasts removed⁴. This is what Seth is pointing at: a doctor watches a patient have her organs cut out, and does not feel there is anything wrong with it, no pity, no reluctance; yet when he sees a chicken killed, he feels the chicken is sacrificed and that is that. The organs of a living human being are cut out in the name of a disease, and he considers this very humane, very scientific, very effective, and moreover necessary, the only method.

Yet the current Western doctor tells the patient with the greatest embarrassment that death is near. He will say: you have cancer, and your life has six months, three months, one year, two years left. And the doctor takes pride in the accuracy of his prediction—I said about three months, and sure enough he did not live past three months. This practice makes the patient feel that his situation is hopeless—you have pronounced the death sentence, told him it is a terminal illness that cannot be cured. Yet when he reads about someone using voodoo to curse an innocent victim, he reacts with reproach and intense loathing. He will say: you are so vicious, so evil, how could you curse an innocent person? He has not thought that when he announces his patient's death date, he is worse than the one who casts voodoo curses. And under the banner of science and Western medical theory, he feels it is normal to tell the patient the date of death, without a trace of guilt in his heart. When the same thing happens in the form of a curse in a primitive society, he is both opposed and disgusted.

In our era, medical professionals once again look upon primitive cultures with a great sense of superiority—including looking at our Chinese medicine, feeling that Chinese medicine is backward in every way, with that expression of disdain and contempt overflowing, feeling it is not worth mentioning. He harshly criticizes those villagers whom he believes are controlled by witch doctors or voodoo: how could you be controlled by these shamans? Frightened by them? Yet the doctors themselves, through advertising, through organized propaganda, make every person in this culture believe: you must have a health checkup every six months, otherwise you might get cancer; you must have medical insurance, otherwise if you get sick you will not receive good care and treatment. What is all this doing? It is all giving you suggestions, all hypnotizing you. If you can understand Seth's earlier words—that in our daily lives we are just like being hypnotized by a hypnotist, wherever the focus of your consciousness is placed, it will manifest in physical reality. The unconscious obeys the commands of conscious beliefs, and it obeys unconditionally, just as in a hypnotic state when someone says you have been burned, you really do get burned. So if you are being hypnotized by these doctors and the medical system every day, you will understand what the result is.

Do not simply assume that these doctors are all doing it for your good. Each doctor himself may think so. When he entered medical school and took the oath—whether Western medicine or ancient Chinese medicine, there was an oath-taking process when formally becoming a disciple. The oath in Chinese medicine—I cannot remember the original text—roughly means the healer's benevolent heart: you cannot treat someone just because he has money and refuse to treat someone because he has no money; you must save all patients under heaven. It is a very well-written classical Chinese text, about one or two hundred characters. But in reality, modern Western medicine has already become a massive interest system controlled by interest groups—pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurance companies, all practitioners and associations, the whole thing controlling this system, and to some degree becoming the opposite of human health.

For example, the United States is the largest country in the world, and its annual GDP is around twenty trillion US dollars⁵. Its annual social medical expenditure accounts for about 22% of the entire GDP⁶, meaning more than one-fifth of the money is spent on seeing doctors and treatment. The annual medical expenditure is over four trillion US dollars⁷, which converts to roughly twenty-eight trillion RMB⁸. What an enormous interest group this is! They form a gang, and they will absolutely never allow other treatment methods to become mainstream. So they brainwash you from childhood—before you even understand anything, they first brainwash your parents, and through your parents they brainwash you, and you brainwash your children, generation after generation.

Therefore, in many cases, modern doctors have forgotten their craft and become incompetent shamans. They no longer believe in the power of healing, and have become hypnotists who no longer believe in the power of natural healing. And what their suggestions bring about are the various diseases that have been pre-diagnosed. Modern doctors are still a kind of hypnotist. What are they suggesting? Pre-diagnosed diseases. He predicts that when people reach a certain age, they have a high probability of getting this disease, what kind of women will get what kind of disease, what kind of men will get what kind of disease—cardiovascular, cardiac, a whole pile. Before you even have it, they scare you every day, telling you to check whether you have any symptoms. You are like a native in a primitive village who has been cursed. You are told to look for certain symptoms—what difference is there between this and a villager in a small village being cursed? Except that what you lose are breasts, appendixes, and other parts of your body, that is all.

Of course, doctors follow their own concepts, and within their system, they themselves believe they are completely reasonable and very humane—I am preventing trouble before it happens, telling you in advance what diseases you might get, and with preventive measures you will not get them. But you must remember, if you go argue with them, you will surely die an ugly death.

Seth says:

No profession faces the full impact of your beliefs more directly than the medical profession.

No profession can more directly face the full impact on your beliefs than the medical profession. The doctor has become a captive of the beliefs he so faithfully endorses—because he genuinely believes in these sciences and theories.

And this statement of his is very heavy:

Their attention is upon disease and not upon health.

Modern Western medicine studies disease, not health. The investment in studying how to treat disease is countless times greater than the investment in studying how to make people live healthier. All the attention is concentrated on specific diseases: how to treat this disease, how to operate on this disease, what drugs to use for this disease. The more you concentrate on this disease, the more it brings about disease. This is not only suggesting to that patient, but also suggesting to the entire society, and even suggesting to the whole of humanity. So from Seth's perspective, he is extremely averse to Western medicine. In several later books he talks about how many American medical institutions directly came out against Seth and would not allow his books to be published. Seth humorously said: if our next book were to be on the recommended reading list of the AMA—the AMA is the American Medical Association⁹—then that would be too ridiculous to imagine. In fact, the AMA's later attacks on them were very severe.

In other words, doctors are also victims of their own belief systems. They often surround themselves with negative suggestions. When disease is viewed as an invader, an intruder imposed upon a sound self for no reason at all, then a person seems powerless, and the conscious mind is also regarded as an appendage. Modern medicine often cannot explain where this disease comes from—it is simply unclear about the origin of the disease. It will guess whether it is some kind of cancer cell mutation, but can it say exactly where the cancer cells came from? It cannot. It makes you feel that this disease suddenly came from outside. But we have all studied the earlier Seth material, and we know that this disease is caused by your own belief system. And when it believes the disease comes from outside, that means you are a powerless person. It comes from outside to invade you, and you can only fight it, cut it out, or treat it with drugs. The conscious mind was originally the most important method of self-healing—adjust your beliefs, change your beliefs, and the disease will be cured—but in its view, the conscious mind is basically useless in treatment, only able to play a very rudimentary role, such as having a better mood being beneficial to recovery.

So the patient is sometimes forced to offer up his organs one after another to his own and the doctor's belief—what belief? The belief that disease comes from outside. But fortunately, in this society, we still retain our belief in "chiropractic"—that is, spinal adjustment and the like, including what we call acupuncture, traditional medicine, massage—and in health foods, and even in the "underground" belief in quack doctors. Chinese people still very much believe in folk remedies—"folk remedies cure serious illnesses." In some treatment methods, folk remedies still work among the people, especially in rural areas. These other systems provide a completely different theory and framework, within which health problems can be resolved. At least in such cases, no harmful drugs are given—referring to those drugs synthesized in chemical factories—and the integrity of the body is not further harmed.

Seth states again that chiropractors are also a kind of hypnotist. Unfortunately, they often seek respect in the medical field. For example, Chinese medicine has now been incorporated into the Western medical system. Chinese medicine was originally supposed to be a completely independent system, but in order to conform to the values and belief system of Western medicine, the current educational system of Chinese medicine has been fully incorporated into the Western medical system, seeking academic credentials, certificates, and approvals. In this way, he wants to gain respect in the medical field, emphasizing the "scientific" side of their work, while downplaying the intuitive components and natural healing. They are practitioners of Chinese medicine themselves, yet they do not stand firm in their own beliefs, and instead feel that those things are unscientific.

And those "quack doctors" encounter people who have already lost all hope. We have a misunderstanding about quack doctors, saying they cannot cure any disease. In fact, the people who come to them are all people who have already been sentenced to death by traditional Western medicine, who cannot be treated, and who have no choice but to seek other methods—what folk saying calls "treating a dead horse as if it were alive." These patients have already realized the ineffectiveness of other belief systems, and have nowhere else to go before they come to quack doctors. Seth particularly emphasizes that there are indeed some quack doctors who are careless and dishonest—he is not saying that all quack doctors are good. But most of them possess an intuitive understanding, and through a momentary change of belief they bring about the patient's healing. Among the people there are many so-called miracle doctors, fox spirits who treat illness, all kinds—and they really are effective. If they were not effective, no one would go to see them. The medical establishment often likes to say that it is these people who prevent patients from seeking proper treatment. But in fact, such patients no longer believe in the doctors' belief system, and therefore they can no longer be helped by doctors. He no longer believes in that Western medical system, and only then does he seek out folk remedies and masters. To doctors, these are all heretical paths, not worth mentioning, because in the doctors' eyes, disease is forever regarded as an objective thing within the body, which should be objectively diagnosed and excised.

But, Seth says, a person who feels "heartless" cannot be saved by the most skilled heart transplant surgery, unless that belief is first changed. This is an example—a person who feels he has no sense of worth, who does not want to live, whose inner consciousness lacks a sense of value, in such a case even a heart transplant is useless. The same applies in other areas: a person who believes he is very poor, no matter how hard he works to earn money, or even if others give him money, he will lose the money, or squander it, or invest it wrongly. So in ancient China there is a saying: "help in an emergency, not in poverty"—if a person has a poverty mindset, giving him money is useless, you cannot change him. This is also why the core of poverty alleviation today is a change in beliefs. If poverty alleviation is only carried out through funds and policies, it actually has no effect; he will fall back into poverty.

A person who has hypnotized himself into a state of loneliness will feel extremely lonely, even if surrounded by a hundred friends or admirers. He feels lonely and solitary in his own sense of self, and even in a lively environment, he still feels lonely. This has nothing to do with the external environment; it is his inner state.

So what do these things mean in daily life? And how can you use these natural hypnotic methods to improve your experience? In those areas where you are dissatisfied, if you feel powerless, or your will feels numb, even if you think your intentions are not like this, as long as you notice your quite conscious thoughts, you will find that you are precisely focusing on those negative views that frighten you. You are very effectively hypnotizing yourself, and reinforcing that negative situation. You may ask in panic: "What do I do? I am hypnotizing myself into being overweight, lonely, or unhealthy?" Yet in other areas of life, you may have hypnotized yourself into wealth, achievement, and satisfaction. A very fat person may be very rich, and a plain-looking person may be very accomplished. In these areas you do not complain. You only complain about those things you do not have, the things you want. The issue involved is no different—in the areas where you are doing well, it is also the result of hypnosis; in the areas where you are not doing well, it is also the result of self-hypnosis. The same principle is at work. In those positive life situations, you are very certain of your own originality, you feel you are born with the ability to make money, you have a very strong feel for wealth, and in that area you never doubt, so your belief becomes reality.

If you have listened to interviews with some very successful entrepreneurs, he will tell you that making money is the easiest thing in the world. Holding such a belief, how could he fail to make money? But interview a person living in hardship, and he will tell you that making money is the hardest thing in the world. Look at how great the difference is between the belief systems of these two people.

All right, in those areas where you are dissatisfied, you must understand that there is no doubt there either. You do not need to doubt yourself any longer—in those areas where you are dissatisfied, you have completely convinced yourself that you are sick, poor, lonely, mentally dull, unhappy. This is all you hypnotizing yourself. And the results follow effortlessly.

So what should you do?

First, you must realize that you yourself are the hypnotist, that you yourself are your own hypnotist. Here, you must take the initiative just as you do in other positive areas of your life. No matter what the surface reasons for the belief are, you must say this:

For a certain period of time, I am willing to temporarily set aside my beliefs in this area, and consciously accept the belief I want. I am willing to pretend that I am under hypnosis, and that I myself am both the hypnotist and the subject. During that period of time, desire and belief will be one, with no conflict. During this time, I am willing to completely change the old belief. Although I am sitting quietly, in my mind I am willing to pretend that the belief I want is already fully mine.

When you do this exercise, do not think of the future, only think of the present. If you are an overweight person, then when doing this exercise, identify yourself as being at your ideal weight, and embed this belief—for example, a girl who likes her weight to be under one hundred jin, then embed the belief "weight under one hundred jin." If you believe you are unhealthy, then imagine yourself as healthy; if you are lonely and solitary, then conversely believe that you are surrounded by friendship and warmth. Realize that you are using your originality to imagine this situation. Here, do not compare it with the normal conditions of your daily life. Do not think about your current life state. Use visualization or words—pictures in your mind, or written descriptions, whichever works, as long as it is the most natural way for you.

Again, it does not need to exceed ten minutes. If you do it honestly in this way, then within a month, you will find new situations realized in your experience. Your nervous system will respond automatically, and the unconscious will also be aroused, exerting its great power—its power comes from a higher dimension, far beyond your imagination—and bring you new results.

Do not try to overdo it. What is overdoing it? Worrying all day about whether this belief is working—that is overdoing it. Some people even say, since it is so effective, I will extend the time, schedule more sessions, think about it from morning to night—do not do this. He emphasizes some specific details here. If you overthink it, it will only cause you to compare everything you have with what you want, producing the contrast of "the thing I want is not here yet." After finishing the exercise, forget about it. So the best habit is to do this exercise during morning meditation, and after finishing, go about your business. But within these five to ten minutes, you must concentrate all of your energy.

Then you will find that you will produce impulses that correspond to these newly embedded beliefs. These impulses will make you want to do certain things, change certain life habits. When these impulses come, you should respond to them—you cannot say, should not this thing happen naturally? It should appear out of thin air; if I have to move, does that not prove that the theory of beliefs creating reality is wrong? This idea is utterly absurd. You cannot have new impulses and then remain completely still, deliberately not moving, afraid that moving will ruin the effect of beliefs creating reality—is that not foolish? It is like the joke I told earlier: a man was shipwrecked at sea, and he said God would come to save him. After a while a helicopter came, and he did not get on; after a while a fishing boat came, and he did not get on; after a while others came to rescue him, and he still would not leave. Finally he died, and when he got to God he said: "God, why did you not come to save me?" God said: "I sent three groups of people to save you, why did you not go with any of them?" He said: "That was not you, God; I was waiting for God to come save me." This joke means the same thing. You must remember that the process by which your beliefs bring about the actual creation of reality requires the cooperation of your physical body's actions. These actions are the new impulses and changes in life habits that naturally arise along with the beliefs, and you just go along with them. The motive power must come from you, and you must try these exercises. You cannot just know this knowledge, read the Seth books, understand these principles, and then sit still without practicing—only by practicing will you know it works.

Now, if you are in poor health and have a doctor—for example, you have a chronic illness—Seth suggests that you had better continue seeing this doctor. Why? Because you still rely on that belief system. If you did not rely on that system, you would not have that doctor. You both believe what Seth says and are half-skeptical about medical drugs—you say you do not need to take your blood pressure medication anymore, do you dare? You do not. So this half-belief, half-doubt will lead to such results. But you can use this exercise as a supplement, to build up your own inner feeling of health, and to protect yourself from any negative influence of the doctor. Since you have a doctor, make use of your belief in the doctor. In the final analysis, you must understand one principle: it is not the doctor who cures your disease, it is your belief that cures your disease. Since you have a doctor who allows you to make use of this belief, then make use of it—this doctor can cure my disease, and at the same time I strengthen my own recovery at home. Just make use of it.

This section is very specific and detailed, telling you how to use this natural hypnosis method in your concrete daily life, spending less than ten minutes a day to bring about substantial changes in your actual lived reality. The Nature of Personal Reality gives very concrete methods on the practical level. If you finish reading this section, I hope everyone will actually try it out in practice, give yourself a month, and see what really happens.

The second part of the commentary on Chapter 16 of the Seth book The Nature of Personal Reality, that is, Session 660, Wednesday evening, May 2, 1973.

Before the Session and the Development of "Sumari"

There was no class on Monday evening, because Jane and Rob had spent a few days traveling. After Wednesday's session, the next morning Jane said, "Really, I think I was doing book-related work all night in my sleep, only I heard my own voice rather than Seth's. I even thought about getting up and writing those things down, but I didn't think that approach would really be useful. I only hope that when we actually have the session, we'll get all those good things." In her dreams she was also writing the book, dictating the book, but strangely, she did not hear Seth's voice, only the sound of her own voice speaking. The effect of that sleep state was surprisingly long-lasting; although it lessened somewhat when it recurred on Thursday night, it did not fully fade away until the weekend. Jane was still transmitting this material throughout her sleep. Jane had obtained a prior experience of the book's material in advance, concerning bridge beliefs. Regarding the concept of bridge beliefs, I think everyone still remembers that she talked about how when two opposing beliefs are in conflict, the better approach is to find a commonality between them, which is the bridge belief. That material was known to Jane while she was sleeping; she had obtained it before the session even began, and it had already been described in Chapter Eleven, Session 644. Her next nighttime work designing Seth's book has a brief report at the very end of this book. She said she wanted to remind him of two topics she hoped Seth would discuss: one was something he had promised some time ago, namely the great flood that occurred in June 1972, right at the beginning of the book in Session 613, and she wanted to hear how Seth would talk about this great flood, and what the meaning was of their behavior and decisions at that time; the other was congenital disability, which Seth had said before he would address, that is, some people are born disabled or handicapped from birth.

Last night, Jane was very active in the ESP class, especially when she spoke and sang as "Sumari," and the songs that came through revealed a new, more complex dimension. Now the lyrics and notes were often short and fast, and as they nimbly leaped up and down across the syllables, they reminded me of a kind of colloquial shorthand, while at the same time Jane seemed to be trying to convey several voices or thoughts simultaneously with only one set of vocal cords. During the session, Seth commented that this recent development of "Sumari" would help her decode the very ancient manuscripts of the Speakers mentioned in the preface—mostly oral ones. However, Seth did not say how this translation would be accomplished. For more notes on the Speakers and "Sumari," see Chapter Five, Session 623.

Actually, these things about the Speakers and "Sumari" were mentioned at the end of Seth Speaks. At that time they wanted to ask Seth whether he could simply let us understand the material of the ancient Speakers through Jane, even if it were just one article or one passage of a speech. At that time Seth said in Seth Speaks that this would require a long period of preparation, and it was not something that could be transmitted just like that, mainly because at that time more of the transmission was done through word of mouth, and no written records were left behind. At that time he said it would take a long time, but more than a year has passed since then. During this process, Jane kept discovering that she had this "Sumari" ability. "Sumari" is actually one of the nine soul families; souls are also divided into several types, and each type has its own characteristics. Jane could draw on "Sumari," mainly expressing it through singing. Rob felt that when Jane sang as "Sumari" in this most recent ESP class, it was more like a simple colloquial shorthand, leaping up and down short and fast. Seth also mentioned that this could help Jane understand how to decode the very ancient oral material of the Speakers. When Jane sang and spoke as "Sumari," sometimes she could translate the content after a couple of days—maybe a day or two, maybe a few weeks, or even months; it was not fixed. But while she was singing and speaking, basically no one else could understand what she was singing and saying, and she herself did not know what those ancient languages and songs actually meant. Generally, after some time passed, she would write out the English translations of those "Sumari" songs herself. So trying to interpret or decode the ancient word-of-mouth material of the Speakers is not an easy task; it is not as we might imagine, where the material could simply be told to us or sent to us and that would be enough.

Conditioning and Compulsive Action

Seth says that there is a definite connection between what is called conditioning and compulsive action.

Session 660

There is a definite connection between so-called conditioning and compulsive action. Here posthypnotic suggestion and constant daily conditioning are both at work. (Session 660)

He says that the previous session already covered how to use natural hypnosis to change beliefs or change the surrounding environment. So-called posthypnotic suggestion and the kind of conditioning we do every day are both at work. What is daily conditioning? It is the habitual actions we perform every day, which can be called a form of conditioning. These two work at the same time. On the one hand, you give yourself a kind of suggestion deep in your mind, but at the same time you are still influenced by a behavioral pattern, a fixed way of thinking, or habitual conditioning. Seth emphasizes that both are at work. Do not think, "I have now adopted a new belief, I have already accepted the new belief through meditation or other means, and I have also replaced my belief, so why is my life still developing according to the old pattern?" Seth tells you that it works together with the old, everyday daily life.

He gives an example. Say there is a woman with a compulsion, and she feels forced to wash her hands twenty to thirty times a day. There are people like this around us, and you may see them around you too. She will constantly wash her hands over and over, and it is easy to recognize this as a repetitive behavior, a compulsive fact, and we immediately recognize that this person has a compulsion. But when a man gets discomfort from his stomach ulcer every time he eats a certain kind of food, and the stomach pain is very hard to bear, it is very difficult for him to perceive that this behavior is also a compulsive and repetitive fact. He cannot perceive that this is something compulsive and repetitive; he only feels that he gets uncomfortable after eating a certain thing. In nature, this is actually connected to and consistent with the compulsive behavior of the woman who washes her hands twenty to thirty times a day; it is the result of the same behavioral pattern. But we do not notice it. Do not be impatient. You do not know what necessary connection lies in between, and Seth uses this entire session to explain what this relationship actually is, and why, after we replace some beliefs, we are still influenced in actual life by this kind of conditioning or compulsive behavior.

Repetitive Behavior and Beliefs on the Magical Level

Seth says this is an excellent example of how natural hypnosis can bring negative effects to your body system.

This is an excellent example of a negative effect that natural hypnosis can bring to your body system. (Session 660)

If what you give to natural hypnosis are bad suggestions, then it will bring about negative effects.

Repetitive behavior is intimately involved with beliefs on the magical level. Such behavior usually represents the person's feeling of imminent evil and his effort to avoid it. (Session 660)

What is meant by beliefs on the magical level? It means that such behavior usually represents the person's feeling of imminent evil and his effort to avoid it. Generally, a person who keeps washing his hands always feels that the world is full of bacteria and viruses everywhere, that the surrounding environment is full of danger everywhere, and that those bacteria and viruses are extremely harmful to people, so that if he is not careful he will be infected. That is why he keeps washing his hands. He believes that the bacteria and viruses existing everywhere in life are like an imminent threat, a kind of evil thing. This is the root cause.

While it is easy to understand the nature of repetitive outward behavior, it is far more difficult to produce many physical symptoms in the same manner. (Session 660)

When we see this person constantly washing his hands, we know he has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the reason is that he is afraid of bacteria and viruses, feels that the surrounding environment is not safe enough, and fears getting sick. This is something we can easily find. But producing many physical symptoms in the same manner is much more difficult. Because the same manner is actually also a kind of fear, a kind of dread, and only then does he give bad suggestions to the body, or believe that a certain food is bad for the body. When symptoms in the body are brought about in this way, such as stomach ulcers, it is very hard for us to find the cause.

But this also involves a large group of reactions that occur again and again to a certain stimulus. Behind them there is often the same kind of "compulsiveness." (Session 660)

What kind of reactions? Reactions that occur again and again to a certain stimulus. For example, if you eat a certain food and get a stomach ulcer, that is one kind of reaction. Some people are allergic to pollen, allergic to some particular thing, and as soon as a certain stimulus comes they have a reaction, while some people are not affected at all. This is a large group of processes in which reactions occur again and again to a certain stimulus. Behind all these behaviors and reactions there is a similar compulsiveness, and the mechanism is the same.

In fact, in their own way, the symptoms often seem like patterns that the nervous system repeats over and over again. (Session 660)

It is like staging a kind of activity, like raising the flag every morning. Raising the flag is a ritual: when a specific time comes and specific music plays, there is a flag-raising ceremony. This is a ritual of the nervous system. When you eat a certain food, it is like triggering the switch of the ritual, causing symptoms to arise, and a series of symptoms follows, just like a ritual, and this ritual is one that the nervous system repeats.

Its meaning is to protect the patient from facing those things he fears even more. (Session 660)

The meaning of this ritual is the cause that leads to the production of physical symptoms. For example, being allergic to pollen, feeling uncomfortable after eating something, and so on: it is meant to keep the patient from facing some things that are even more frightening. Deep inside him there are still some deeper, terrifying fears, and then through illness or symptoms he avoids facing them, and instead focuses his attention on the illness and the disease itself. He has not discovered the core thing at the bottom, that there is something even more frightening inside.

Belief Systems and "Trappings"

That is why belief systems are so important when dealing with health and illness. (Session 660)

When we deal with illness and health, belief systems are very important.

Every system uses some "trappings." These "trappings" include gestures, medicines, methods of treatment. They are the outward manifestations of the beliefs shared between healer and patient. (Session 660)

The belief systems here include the patient's own belief system, the doctor's belief system, and also the larger belief system of society as a whole. They work together, forming an integrated, mixed belief system. This belief system is very important. And every system has its own "trappings," including gestures, medicines, methods of treatment, surgeries, various forms of chemotherapy and radiation therapy -- these are all its "trappings." But the purpose of all these outward "trappings" is not the real method of healing. The real method of healing is your belief system. Those are just "trappings." What actually heals you is your belief system. Those external medicines, techniques, and treatment methods are all a kind of ritual, or "trappings." Let me give an imperfect example: when a shaman heals you, he also needs a set of rituals and procedures. In ancient times, when great masters came to treat strange illnesses, they would also set up formations and perform rites -- those rites were also a kind of "trapping." Their purpose is the same: to get your belief system to work in the process, to make you believe that through this method your illness can be cured. It is to make you believe that through such methods the illness can be cured. Some people go to Western doctors, some go to Chinese doctors, some go to witch doctors, some go to quacks -- all of them may possibly cure you. It is not that one is definitely effective and another is not.

For example, with hay fever, also called pollen illness, certain people react to grass seeds and flower pollen, especially in springtime. Obviously, many people get this illness in large numbers. The same is true of most other discomforts.

He says this pollen illness is something like that. It makes you feel unwell, as if it were a disease. Actually it is not a disease, just a discomfort. If you insist on defining it as a disease, then it becomes hay fever, pollen allergy, and they prescribe you some medicine and so on. Actually all of this is caused by your belief system.

Natural Hypnosis and Conscious Beliefs

Natural hypnosis and conscious beliefs give the unconscious its proper instructions. Then they very responsibly influence the body's mechanisms. (Session 660)

Natural hypnosis and conscious beliefs work at the same time, and then they give your unconscious a proper instruction, a command. Under the influence of these two things, your unconscious very responsibly influences your body's mechanisms. So when your body has a problem, you just look for the root cause in these two things.

Reacting in ways that are harmonious with these beliefs. (Session 660)

Our body then reacts to these two instructions in ways that are harmonious with these beliefs.

Therefore, you have conditioned the body to react in a certain manner. (Session 660)

Because you are limited by this kind of belief, this conscious limitation, it will condition the body to react in a certain way.

Of course, it is not a simple matter to deal with. (Session 660)

It is not a very simple matter.

The first hint of discomfort is produced because of another belief. (Session 660)

When you feel uncomfortable, for example with pollen allergies and so on, this discomfort initially arises because of another belief.

In the formal hypnosis used in the West, you can go back and discover where the suggestion was first given to you. (Session 660)

In formal hypnosis in the West, where a hypnotist is involved, it can go back and find the place where you were first given the suggestion.

If you and your hypnotist both believe in reincarnation, then the root may also be discovered in another life. (Session 660)

In other words, when you develop physical symptoms because you are allergic to something, or because you ate something, it is actually because you are influenced by natural hypnosis and your conscious belief system. But how did this thing originally come about? Why does it happen again and again? If you use a normal Western hypnotist for hypnosis, they will generally go back and find the scene where you were first hypnotized, and then have you change it.

In either case, if the therapy is effective, then you may give up your symptom. (Session 660)

In either case, if you and the hypnotist secretly believe that those firmly held situations and frameworks are the cause of the symptom, if you feel that the original suggestion was the problem, and if the therapy is effective, it is because you gave up that symptom. The reason is that both you and the hypnotist believe that your current symptom was caused by some suggestion in the past, and once that suggestion is removed, your condition gets better. This is a framework, a framework of cause and effect. If you believe in it, it helps your therapy, because it helps you find the cause, change it, destroy it, and your symptom is gone.

But there is more to it than that. If you do not believe in your own worth as a person, then you will continue to get other symptoms. These must then be excused in the same manner, using other past events as the excuse for the condition. (Session 660)

It seems as though you have found the original scene where the suggestion first began, and it seems resolved, but there are still more problems. If you do not believe in your own worth as a person, you will continue to get other symptoms, and you must use the same approach, using other past events as the excuse.

If you are not so fortunate, and your illness happens to involve the internal organs, then you may sacrifice one organ after another. (Session 660)

If you are fortunate, the hypnotist takes you back to find the root of today's illness, and both of you must believe that today's problem was caused by some past event, and he can really cure you. But after the cure, the root has not been removed, because as a person, you always hope to seek solutions from outside, you always hope to find answers from the hypnotist, you always hope to find answers in one past event. You do not realize that today's illness is actually caused by your present beliefs. Going back to what Seth said earlier, the present is the point of power, and you can completely change the past. Since you can change the problems of the past, then the past is not the root cause of your present problems. But you do not realize this. So Seth says, when you do not believe in your worth as a person, you yourself have this ability, you inherently possess it, but if you do not believe it, other symptoms will still arise. After the symptoms arise, you will again look for excuses from outside, from some past event, saying that today's symptom is because of some event in the "past." This "past" is in quotation marks, because there is actually no real past. But from the perspective of us normal human beings, there are still past events. At this point, if you find a good therapist or hypnotist again, and they help bring you back to the past, you can resolve these problems. If you do not find a good hypnotist or therapist, and you follow the normal medical route, and your illness happens to involve the internal organs, then you may sacrifice one organ after another. Because in Western medicine, they believe that if an organ is not good, has problems, has degenerated, has lost its function, then they cut it out.

All of this can be avoided by realizing that your point of power is in the present. (Session 660)

If you understand this point, all of this can be avoided.

You operate, of course, not only within your personal beliefs, but also within the mass beliefs that you more or less acknowledge. (Session 660)

You must remember this: we operate not only within our personal beliefs, but also within mass beliefs at the same time.

Health Insurance and Self-Suggestion

So within this organization, for most people, health insurance has become a necessary measure. Therefore I do not suggest that you cancel your health insurance. Nevertheless, let us look at this situation a bit further. You are paying in advance for an illness you are certain will befall you. (Session 660)

Why do I not suggest canceling it? You are paying in advance for an illness you are certain will befall you. So-called insurance, especially major illness insurance, is something you pay into ahead of time, saving a little at a time for a lump sum later. Because you are certain you might get sick, and the probability is high, that is why you buy insurance. You are now making all preparations for a future in which you are ill. What are you doing when you buy insurance? You are making preparations and arrangements for the self that will be sick in the future. To put it bluntly, it is like arranging your own funeral affairs, because many insurance policies are for after death, life insurance, where compensation is only paid after the body dies. Many insurance policies are like this. In this situation, you are like someone arranging their own funeral affairs.

You are betting on illness rather than health. (Session 660)

When you buy major illness insurance, you carefully pick the one that covers more illnesses, and you study each illness in detail: this one is not covered, that one is not covered, which one is covered. When you are studying these illnesses, what are you doing? Actually, deep in your heart you are secretly thinking, I certainly do not want to get this illness. But at the same time you are secretly thinking you do not want to get this illness, you are buying insurance for the possible occurrence of that illness. This is the worst kind of self-hypnosis. You are hypnotizing yourself. You think that as a human being, you will get sick; people eat all kinds of grains, so how can anyone avoid illness? Everyone gets sick. Since I might get sick, is it not good to prepare in advance and take some preventive measures? When you are preparing preventive measures, you are actually giving yourself suggestions, and you reinforce those suggestions through action by actually buying insurance and paying premiums every month. When you pay premiums every month, the insurance policy frequently appears in your life, and you are giving yourself suggestion and reinforcement again and again.

Yet within your system, insurance is indeed necessary. Because the belief in illness is so pervasive in your psychic atmosphere. (Session 660)

In this three-dimensional world of humanity today, insurance is indeed necessary. Why? Because you live within the beliefs of this group. Within this group belief, the belief in illness is greater than yours. When you tell others, "I will not get sick; I am naturally not the kind of person who gets sick," most people will think you may already have a mental illness. If you were not mentally ill, how could you say such a thing? So you will find yourself in a state where the whole society believes everyone should get sick, and you will feel that a hospital is just a standard fixture. Many people, when buying a house or choosing a place to invest or settle, first ask whether it is far from a hospital and whether a nearby hospital is convenient. What do you think they are doing? They have already presupposed that one day in the future they will certainly be inseparable from a hospital, so they want to find a place closer to one. Think about how strong this person's suggestion to themselves is.

For those people, this act itself symbolizes an acceptance of illness. (Session 660)

Many people start getting sick only after they have taken out such a policy. If you observe carefully, many people even feel fortunate and say, see, thank goodness I had insurance; if I had not had insurance, no one would have paid for my illness. They actually do not know that they only started getting sick after getting insurance. For those people, this act itself represents an acceptance of illness. I accept and believe this belief: people are certain to get sick, and everyone may get sick. If you did not buy insurance, you are not smart enough, you do not know how to manage money, you do not know how to take care of yourself. They give you a pile of reasons: I am smarter than you, I take more thorough and complete care of myself. If by chance they get sick after buying insurance, they will tell everyone, see, I bought insurance, and as soon as I bought it I got sick; thank goodness I bought insurance. They do not realize that the illness was suggested into being by their own mind after buying the insurance.

Even more unfortunate are some special insurance policies for the elderly. They present in advance all the templates and most distorted concepts about health and age. (Session 660)

There are some insurance policies aimed at the elderly. They list in detail, in advance, all the templates and most distorted concepts about health and age. And there is a great correlation between people choosing insurance and the illness they subsequently fall into. That is, between your buying insurance and your subsequently getting sick, there is a great correlation.

Even worse than this are those recommendations, made with the best of intentions. (Session 660)

Its starting point is good intention; that cannot be denied. Even worse are some recommendations. Buying insurance is only one of them. In your daily life, the suggestions given to you by the surrounding society, authoritative institutions, doctors, and medical organizations are the worst.

Cancer Awareness Campaigns and Negative Suggestion

Seth says, I only want to discuss two of these. One is the cancer-prevention literature and the public service announcements on television. There are many public service ads that seem very humane, seemingly for the public good, in which they give the seven danger signals of cancer¹⁰, telling you to check certain points regularly. If you find one or several of these seven signals on your body, it proves you have the possibility of cancer.

Unfortunately, within your belief system, this has almost become necessary for many people. Particularly for those who have had some prior dealings with this disease. (Session 660)

Some people have had family members, relatives, friends, or colleagues who got this disease, and their fear of it is almost irrational. Why? Because they think that getting cancer means death, that cancer is a terminal illness. This is their belief. When they have dealt with the illness of close friends or relatives, when someone around them got this disease and was hospitalized, when they visited them, understood the progression of the illness, and finally witnessed the whole process leading to death, then this disease becomes a tremendous shock to them. They think, a perfectly healthy person, a colleague who was still at work with me yesterday, how come he is hospitalized today? How come he is failing in a couple of days? How come he passed away in another two months? This cancer is too terrifying, and it is affecting younger and younger people. He has all kinds of fears, fears coming one after another, causing his fear of cancer to become irrational, fearful to the extreme.

These campaigns and announcements then become strong negative suggestions. According to the nature of natural hypnosis, they form a process of conditioning. You look for the particular symptoms there, and you examine your bodies under the impetus of fear. (Session 660)

Hypnosis is a process of conditioning. You are looking for symptoms, and then you examine your body, with the premise being under the impetus of fear. Be sure to remember, it is under the impetus of fear that you examine your body.

For those already conditioned in such a manner, this procedure may bring about the very cancer that would not otherwise have occurred. (Session 660)

For those already influenced by this fear, by the campaigns, articles, public account content, and the recommendations of various medical organizations, all of which seem to be promoting to you with love, as if helping you stay away from cancer, in fact they are guiding you toward the process of becoming cancerous. This procedure may bring about the very cancer that would not otherwise have occurred. This is a typical example. Before humanity discovered cancer, long ago, at that time they did not know it was called cancer, but there would have been similar people. Yet the proportion of people getting cancer was absolutely not as high as it is now. Now, as living standards improve, and work intensity, bodily fatigue from use, and all aspects are improving, after so many years of development in human society, with living conditions improving day by day, why is the cancer incidence rate not falling but rising? This is a very strange thing. If you think carefully about where the reason lies, the reason lies in this kind of promotion of cancer, in the impact on people after cancer is portrayed as a terminal illness. Of course, we do not deny the influence of the natural environment, but the main influence is right here. You are within such a framework, influenced by such beliefs, and you cannot help but believe, because you have seen your loved ones get cancer and die, seen good friends or friends' relatives die shortly after getting cancer. In the face of such vivid experiences, you cannot help but be afraid. Therefore, it is very likely to lead to cancer that would not otherwise have occurred, just because of this.

This does not mean those people would not become ill from other diseases. But it does mean that this method patterns beliefs about illness. (Session 660)

It is not that he would only get cancer and not other diseases, no. But this method patterns our beliefs about illness, makes them formulaic. The whole society follows such a pattern, and even the treatment methods are fixed: if you get cancer at an early stage, how to treat it with surgery; if there is no surgical value at a later stage, then radiation and chemotherapy, or surgery plus radiation and chemotherapy, and so on, forming a kind of routine. For each type of cancer, they roughly give a statistical survival time: lung cancer, survive half a year; liver cancer, survive how long; what kind of cancer can last how long, and then they fit you into it, determine what stage your cancer is, calculate a survival time for you, and pronounce a sentence on you. This method patterns illness through belief, making everyone believe it, focusing attention on specific symptoms, and even making you go check those symptoms. Many people say, is your back itching? Is that a pre-cancer symptom? There are also many symptoms like sensitivity to cold, stomach cold, and so on, and they sum up many pre-cancer symptoms for you to observe in yourself.

In that light, it is no wonder that you need health insurance. (Session 660)

According to what he said before, you certainly need health insurance. Why? Because you live in such a broad atmosphere, in such a broad atmosphere of belief, and you are inevitably influenced by it.

Illness is not an alien thing thrust upon you. But as long as you believe that it is, then you will accept it in that fashion. (Session 660)

Illness is not an alien thing thrust upon you, but is caused by your own beliefs. But as long as you believe it is alien, then you will accept it in that fashion. You will feel powerless to fight against it, because it is alien, how can you fight against it? You do not even know how it came. It is not caused by yourself, it is alien and thrust upon you, so you feel powerless, with no way out.

Retirement and Age Beliefs

The second health issue I want to discuss concerns the elderly. (Session 660)

The first issue he just discussed was about cancer, and he said he would address two topics; the second is about the elderly.

The idea of retirement usually falls into the same kind of pattern. Because hidden within them is the belief that sooner or later, at a definite age, your powers begin to decline. (Session 660)

We have the concept and belief of retirement, and what does it lead to? It says that sooner or later, at a definite age, your powers begin to decline. That is why you need to retire. You retire because you are old and can no longer work; your physical strength, your reaction time, and all other aspects are no longer up to it. Since you are no longer capable, you have to step down; you are no longer competent for the job. At this point, the whole society gives you a clear suggestion: once you reach a certain age, you are no longer capable, and it even gives you an exact age. For women it is one age, for men another; for example, women at 55 and men at 60, that is the statutory retirement age¹¹. It even separates women and men, which is also a distinctive feature of China. In other countries, as far as I know, they do not distinguish between men and women; the retirement age is the same. But in the United States, you can retire at 62, but you only receive 80% of your pension; it seems that if you retire at 67, you can receive 100% of your pension until you die¹². There are two time periods, and you can choose either; you can also choose not to retire. The United States has no mandatory retirement age. If you are 67, 68, 69, or 70 and want to keep working, you can keep working; no one says that once you reach a certain point you can no longer work. That is a very interesting thing. But in China, generally in companies there is a mandatory retirement age, unless you are in a private enterprise or are an individual business owner, in which case there is no restriction. If you work in a large enterprise, there is a retirement age limit. It even extends to things like getting a driver's license and driving. In the United States, there is no age limit for a driver's license; after a certain age, the requirements for reaction ability and physical examinations simply become more frequent, such as requiring a physical exam once a year, or after an even older age, once every six months, to see whether your reaction ability is still sufficient. But it does not say that once you reach a certain age you can no longer get a driver's license or drive. Yet in China, as I recall, there is a regulation that after 60 you are not allowed to take the driver's license test, but if you already have a license you can keep driving; it seems that after 70 you are also not allowed to drive anymore¹³. I do not remember exactly, but that is the general idea; there is an age limit. This kind of age limit and this kind of thing, if you really think about it, is all a kind of suggestion, suggesting that once you reach a certain age you are no longer capable.

These ideas are usually accepted equally by young and old alike. Young people believe them, and automatically begin a gradual conditioning of their own minds and bodies. (Session 660)

The whole society accepts this. When young people believe this belief, they automatically begin a gradual conditioning of their own minds and bodies. It is not a sudden conditioning; they set something for themselves, like a timer: I will be no good at 60, and right now I am only 40, or now 30, or now 50, so they automatically set a timer for themselves, and then they observe. It is not that they suddenly become incapable; they become incapable gradually. How does this incapability come about? They themselves feel that both body and mind are no longer capable; that is how it comes about. Once you yourself accept and endorse these beliefs, you begin to follow that countdown, becoming less capable year by year. And when the time comes, you can receive that result: once you are old you are useless, and you will proceed along that path.

Especially in your society, a person's entire mental energy is directed toward the pursuit of money. (Session 660)

Seth points out that in our present society, a person's entire mental energy, all of their physical and mental energy, is spent on chasing money.

The most humiliating situation brought about by this belief is especially humiliating for men. He is often told to equate masculine prowess with the ability to earn money. (Session 660)

It is a social consensus. If the whole of human society, today's material society, treats the pursuit of money as a benchmark, saying that the more money a person has, the stronger their abilities in every respect, and that money is the primary measure of success, then a problem arises: if this man no longer has the ability to earn money, if he no longer has earning power, then his ability in bed is also no longer there, and his masculine prowess is also gone.

Then it is easy to understand that when he loses his earning ability, he feels "castrated." (Session 660)

Then impotence, premature ejaculation, all these problems emerge; his ability in bed is also gone; he feels his age is advanced and his body is no longer capable; this state begins to appear. This is a very interesting thing, but many people do not know why. Seth points out this problem with a single incisive remark. Actually, everyone probably has some sense of it in their hearts: when a man is successful in his career, commanding the business world, or thriving in official circles, his sexual ability is also very strong. After he retires, steps back to a secondary position, or his business takes a turn, undergoes a setback, or collapses, his ability in this area also declines. It is a very strange feeling; he himself feels that he is no longer capable. So Seth uses the phrase "the most humiliating situation": for men, their sexual ability, their ability to make love, is tied to their ability to earn money. So you will understand why many women do not understand, saying, why does this man still have to strive so desperately, to earn money, when you are already doing well enough? Many women say, I just want to live a very stable life; let us just live a simple and happy life together; I do not have such strong material desires. Yet men seem to have great ambitions and a strong desire for money. Many people do not understand, but Seth has essentially revealed this little secret: he is afraid that he is not capable, so he desperately earns money to prove that he is capable. And at the same time, it genuinely helps his performance; when he earns a lot of money, his performance in this area genuinely recovers. Some people say that his ability rises and falls along with his business, and it all has an influence. Many people, even when they are not capable, still force themselves to be capable.

Health Foods and Food Beliefs

Generally speaking, those who advocate health foods or natural foods are also influenced by roughly the same beliefs held by your physicians. They believe that illness is the result of external conditions. (Session 660)

Nowadays there is more and more talk about health preservation, what foods are healthy, what foods are not healthy, and every day all kinds of articles flood our surroundings. They believe that illness is the result of external conditions, that it is external. To put it simply, they have a slogan, and we can still see it now: you are what you eat. There is an even more ridiculous one that says, try to eat more alkaline foods, or drink some alkaline water, and your body will become alkaline. How ridiculous is that? You drink alkaline water and your body becomes alkaline? If it were that simple, everything would be easy.

Some people in these groups also endorse concepts that slightly temper those ideas and philosophies. (Session 660)

They use some philosophical health preservation concepts, like cooperating with nature, following the natural solar terms, eating the foods of each season, eating seasonal vegetables according to the season being good for the body, and so on. They have some philosophical ideas about balance, combining meat and vegetables, balanced nutrition, and not being a picky eater. These things all bring philosophical concepts into so-called healthy eating. They also seem to acknowledge the importance of the mind, saying you should keep a pleasant mood, go pick natural, organic, pesticide-free, non-toxic foods, and so on. They will also acknowledge philosophically that these foods are all made with heart. Many people say that when I went to practice at a temple, some temples accept lay practitioners to practice there, and the vegetarian meals made by the kitchen monks are really delicious, because they all make them with heart. Although they are completely vegetarian, the taste is really fragrant. They also emphasize the importance of the mind; they do acknowledge it.

But because they often carry some very negative, strong suggestions. (Session 660)

When they give positive suggestions, they also bring some negative suggestions to you. For example, only accepting certain foods is a negative suggestion. For example, eating organic is good, eating non-organic is not good, eating meat is not good. When eating meat you should eat white meat; four-legged animals are not as good as two-legged ones, two-legged ones are not as good as legless ones, and so on. All these ideas will suggest things to you. All other foods that are not approved and accepted will be considered bad for the body and likely to cause illness. They think that if you eat these junk foods you will get sick, that eating too much meat will lead to cardiovascular disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, high blood lipids, and so on. They will tell you that eating food can cause problems.

People will begin to become afraid of the food they eat. (Session 660)

When he eats, he will think, is this food helpful to my body? Could eating the wrong thing cause problems? Eating was originally a very pleasant and normal thing, but it becomes a point of contention. Every day people struggle over what to eat, how to eat more healthily, how eating is unhealthy, and which foods are harmful to health.

So food is then given moral value judgments. (Session 660)

Food itself is a product of nature, neither good nor bad, but some are seen as good and some as bad. We can make lists, categories, and charts telling you to eat more of this and less of that. This situation is quite interesting. For example, the simplest case: we have always believed that popular science articles tell us that eating lard is not good, especially that saturated fatty acids like lard are bad for people, extremely harmful to health, and linked to the incidence of cardiovascular disease, and so on. They present a pile of evidence saying that people who eat meat, people who eat lard, and so on. So now many people believe that eating pork, eating lard, eating fatty oil is bad for the body. But a couple of years ago, scientists discovered through a series of observational studies that lard is actually the best thing for the human body, and then ranked lard fourth or second¹⁴ among the one hundred healthiest foods for humans, a very high position. They said lard is simply too good for the human body, that there is nothing better for human health than lard, or rather fat, that nothing is better for the human body than fat, especially pork fat, which is better for the human body and more easily absorbed by humans, and so on. They overemphasized and exaggerated the benefits of lard. Both of these views are wrong. Do not emphasize which foods are good for you and which are bad for you. You should think that when these foods enter your body, they are all beneficial to you, and your beliefs determine how you digest and absorb them. He will talk about this later.

Then, at this point, your symptoms appear. (Session 660)

He says that eating oily or fried foods is bad for the body and will cause this and that, and then you will develop similar symptoms. There really are people whose hearts become unwell after eating this, and it is very directly considered the natural result of eating something on the forbidden food list. You got high blood lipids because you ate oily foods, which eventually led to high blood pressure, high blood lipids, and heart disease, because you ate this, because you were too gluttonous.

But, at least within this system, the body is not invaded by all sorts of inexplicable drugs used for treatment. (Session 660)

The good thing is that although this system is also incorrect, although its views are also incorrect, at least what is eaten is still food, not chemical drugs. At least the body is not invaded by these chemical drugs.

However, the body may be deprived of much-needed nourishment. (Session 660)

Although it is not invaded by drugs, it may be deprived of much-needed nourishment. Here I will give a simple example. Last year I saw a news story about a so-called food blogger from abroad. She was a vegetarian¹⁵ who insisted on eating vegetarian food and posted what she ate every day on YouTube or Instagram. Her three meals a day were all green, especially healthy, fresh green vegetables and fruits, not a bit of meat, nothing else, all healthy. She lived this kind of life for several years, I cannot remember the specific details, and then she had to go see a doctor. She found that her body was not only not as healthy as she had imagined, but had developed many problems. The main issue was that she was a young woman, and she found that her period had stopped. It had been a long time since she had a period, or if she did have one it was very light, and in the end it basically disappeared, and she entered menopause. At that time she was only in her early thirties, just over thirty, and she began menopause¹⁶. This scared her badly, and she went to see a doctor. After a series of examinations and asking about her situation, the doctor told her that this was a very typical result of not consuming fat over a long period. Then she went back and began eating like a normal person, eating meat and other things, and her body quickly recovered and she was fine. Later she posted a video specifically introducing this matter. Because she had appeared as an idol or internet celebrity of this so-called green food movement, she had many fans, and when she suddenly posted such a video, everyone was shocked. How could this happen? This is a typical example. There are too many such facts. If you look at the people around you, you will see many, many people like this, who only eat one kind of thing or only eat one category of things.

Actually, there is another opposite example with many restrictions, and that is Steve Jobs. Jobs, the founder of Apple, went to India to practice for a period when he was young, and when he came back he absorbed a lot of Indian culture. One aspect of Indian culture is that Indians believe eating meat is bad, so about 70 to 80 percent of people in India are still vegetarians today¹⁷, and they believe eating vegetarian is the healthiest. Jobs was also influenced by this, learned some Zen meditation and Hindu practices, and under the influence of these religions felt that eating meat was bad for the body and would affect his thinking, and so on. So what did he do? He only ate vegetarian food, and in the end he reached an extreme. He heard someone tell him that carrots were the best thing for the human body, so for a period he only ate carrots: all kinds of steamed carrots, boiled carrots, stir-fried carrots, and when stir-frying he would not even use oil. Anyway, all kinds of carrots: carrot juice, carrot water, carrot drinks, all carrots, from morning to night all carrots. Carrots ground into powder, made into noodles, made into all kinds of food, anyway all carrots. After eating this way for a while, the people around him felt that even Jobs's skin gave off a faint yellow color, an orange-yellow color¹⁸, and his skin looked somewhat carrot-colored. He did not eat anything else, all carrots. Everyone knows the later outcome: in his forties he got pancreatic cancer, then after an operation he seemed to recover, and after about ten years or so, or maybe more than ten years, in his early fifties he passed away, still from a recurrence of pancreatic cancer¹⁹. From this we can see that given Jobs's financial conditions and diet, there should have been no shortage of so-called nutritionists and nutrition experts around him, but none of them could prevent this tragedy. Such a genius of the computer world died so early from a malignant tumor.

So Seth has already pointed out that when you cannot be fooled every day by these so-called health experts and specialists saying this cannot be eaten and that cannot be eaten, the simplest approach is to eat everything, or to eat whatever you want to eat, and your body will tell you. In the past people would say that it is only your brain that wants to eat something, but you have never asked your body what it wants to eat.

Let me give another simple example. In ancient China, emperors had many, many dishes made, and he would only eat a few bites of each²⁰. We think he was extremely extravagant and wasteful, and he was indeed extravagant and wasteful, that cannot be denied. But have you noticed why he did this? Many people think it was to show off, to display his status, but that is only one aspect and not the main one. What was his main method? He wanted to absorb the nutrition of various ingredients from among them. Suppose an emperor could eat eighty to one hundred twenty kinds of food in a day²¹, different combinations and mixtures of foods, while ordinary people might only eat one or two kinds, or two or three kinds of food combinations in a day. If a family was a bit better off, they could eat a dozen or twenty kinds; the poorer the family, the more monotonous the food. So he ate for variety, not for any one particular thing. It was not as you might imagine, that he only ate the most premium and nutritious things, like eating ginseng, snow lotus, deer antler, and bear paw every day. No, if you carefully look at the emperor's daily menu, what he ate was the five grains and miscellaneous cereals, just prepared more finely. He ate everything: coarse grains, fine grains, mixed grains, black beans, all kinds of oats, everything. This is very normal. Once, actually with one of our country's leaders²², on a certain occasion, I will not go into the specific setting, but whether it was a state banquet or breakfast, I have eaten in that kind of situation. In that state, you will find that the food they eat has a very distinctive feature: there are especially many varieties, but it is not made of all the most premium things as you might imagine. It is not high-end; it is just that there are many varieties. To

You Are What You Think

Beyond that, the whole question of health and illness is simplified. (Session 660)

While your body is lacking nutrition, you also simplify the whole question of health and illness. Eating a certain thing will make you healthy, eating a certain thing will make you sick -- you have simplified it.

Every food is to be scrutinized carefully. (Session 660)

The ingredients of every food have to be listed. This started abroad -- how much protein it contains, how much of this trace element, how much fiber, how much vitamin A, B, C, D.

Then at this point Seth made a joke. He said:

You are what you think, not what you eat. (Session 660)

This line is a jab at the saying "you are what you eat." Seth wants to tell you, you are what you think, not what you eat. In other words, your beliefs determine you, not the things you eat determining what you are.

To a large extent, what you think about what you eat is far more important. (Session 660)

That is, what you think about the food you eat -- how you think about it, how you regard it -- is far more important than the food itself. The thing itself is not that important, but how you regard the thing -- whether you think it is good for you, nutritious, or whether you think it is bad for you in itself -- how you regard it, this matter itself is far more important than the food itself.

What you think about your bodily health and illness is your belief determining how your food is utilized. (Session 660)

So this reveals something very interesting. People in our current urban society may eat far more refined food, or better food, with more nutrition, than many people in rural or countryside areas. But you will find that in some very impoverished or even very backward areas -- I am not talking about areas where people cannot get enough to eat -- if normal food supply is guaranteed, even though what they eat is relatively simple, their bodily health is actually much better than that of city people. It is very interesting if you look closely. For example, the simplest example: I once went with some people to Bama Village in Guangxi. Bama is called the land of longevity. The whole township is long-lived, and there are centenarians everywhere²³, very many of them. They told a joke at the time. They said that when the higher-ups came to investigate gambling -- playing mahjong was considered gambling -- the inspectors who came to check on gambling arrived at the village entrance and found an old man standing guard there. As soon as the old man saw the people with red armbands coming to check and arrest gamblers, he turned and ran into the village, shouting as he ran: "The gambling police are here! The gambling police are here! Everyone hide quickly!" This old man could not run fast, and they chased after him and caught him. They said, why are you running? You are even tipping people off. At your age, who are you tipping off? And this old man was apparently a hundred and some years old. After they caught him, what was he actually doing? He was tipping people off, because his father and mother, his uncles and older relatives -- the people older than him -- were inside playing mahjong. Those people were all a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty-some years old, some maybe a hundred and thirty²⁴. He was the youngest, so he did not get a turn at mahjong, did not get a turn at the table, so they sent him outside to stand guard and keep watch. He was already over a hundred years old, and he still ran very fast -- the gambling inspectors chased him for quite a while before catching him. This is a joke describing the longevity and health of the people in that land of longevity.

But the people in this land of longevity actually live in a relatively closed environment. Transportation to the outside is inconvenient, and local produce is not abundant. The most common thing they find is corn, which the locals call baogu. They often use their own corn to brew liquor and make things to eat from corn. Their main food source is corn, though of course they also eat some raised poultry and plants and animals. At the time, an editor or reporter from a so-called health food magazine went to ask the local old people: What do you all eat? You are so healthy and can live so long -- are there some special foods or ingredients that we do not know about? We want to learn and understand. The old person said: What do we eat? In the morning, at noon, we eat corn. What we eat is corn. In the morning we drink corn porridge, at noon we eat corn cakes, in the evening we drink cracked corn. All kinds of things made from corn -- it is all corn. At most we have a little corn liquor to satisfy a craving. It is just corn. Then the reporter asked the old person: What do you love to eat most? The old person said: Meat. Of course I most want to eat meat. What I most want to eat is meat. Every year when we slaughter the pig for New Year, what I most want to eat is meat. I can eat a lot of meat.

I give this example to tell you that the people you think of as truly long-lived are not actually doing anything special in terms of diet, not eating as healthily as you imagine, not following what those nutrition experts tell you -- this and that, pile after pile, too much to keep up with, this is good and that is bad. That is not how it is. How you believe in your food, how you think your body absorbs it -- this belief determines your absorption of the food. What you think about your bodily health and illness is your belief determining how your food is utilized.

Food and Health: Belief Determines Absorption

Your beliefs determine how food is utilized, and how the chemical processes within the body handle food -- for example, how fats and sugars are processed. He gives the example of fats and sugars, because generally Westerners think that fat is bad and sugar is also bad. And your attitude when preparing food is also very important -- even the attitude you have while cooking will affect how you absorb the food, which is very interesting. Once we understand these things, we can change how we view food.

In physical terms, what he said above is all true; but likewise, generally speaking, your body needs a variety of different nutrients. However, within that pattern, there is still a great deal of leeway.

But within that pattern, there is still a great deal of leeway (room to maneuver).

The body itself has an astonishing ability to use substitutes, so you do not need to worry. For example, people who live by the sea often eat fish, while people who live inland may rarely eat fish their whole lives -- I am referring to ancient times, when people living deep in the mountains or on the plains did not eat much seafood; they had no kelp or sea vegetables, and did not eat them. But people living by the sea would eat them often. So would people living inland develop deficiency symptoms? There was that goiter condition. In some places there really was goiter, and it could be resolved simply by supplementing with some seafood or taking iodine tablets.

So now iodine is added to all salt -- iodized salt began to be added to regular table salt. Actually, in our normal lives, if you are not living in those loess plateau areas -- like Gansu or northern Shaanxi -- you are not iodine deficient. But now the whole society, the entire country, is adding iodine, a little every day, day after day, until in the end many people end up with too much iodine. Now the incidence of thyroid cancer has actually increased compared to before²⁵ -- not from iodine deficiency, but from too much iodine.

I give this example to say that when you do not live by the sea and normally have no way to take in iodine, the human body is very ingenious -- it will help you find substitutes, and it is not the case, as scientists believe, that lacking something means you cannot function.

In 2019, from January 1st through December, I spent an entire year experimenting with the ketogenic diet. If you do not know what that is, look up "ketogenic diet" online. The ketogenic diet means not eating carbohydrates -- no sugar, no starch, and avoiding everything related to sugar and starch -- and eating only fatty foods, meaning animal fats. Among meats, you mainly eat the fatty parts -- a large portion of meat is protein; if you eat chicken breast or lean meat, much of it is protein, and only fatty meat is fat. The ketogenic diet requires that about 80% of your daily food source comes from fat, which completely overturns the usual concept.

I tried it for a whole year, and the result was that the body completely provides substitutes. When you do not eat sugar, the body naturally produces something else. In other words, when you always eat sugar and do not eat fat, it is the same -- you will not be lacking anything. Not eating a certain kind of food over the long term does not have any bad effect on your physical health. If you look online, there are many people who have stuck with the ketogenic diet for several years, and they are perfectly normal. After I finished the experiment, I returned to my normal diet, and there was not much change, but during the trial period there were some benefits.

The benefits were as follows. First, if you are overweight or your figure is not good, it will automatically -- without you doing any extra exercise -- as long as you stick to the ketogenic diet, your weight will quickly return to a normal level within the first two or three months.

On the other hand, your overall mental state will be very good. Because sugar metabolism lasts a short time, roughly four or five hours, and once sugar metabolism ends you feel hungry; when blood sugar drops, it sends a signal to the brain saying you need to eat. If you eat too much, blood sugar rises again, and you feel tired and want to rest. So during the day, there is not much time when you are neither full nor hungry; every day your blood sugar rises and falls. The ketogenic diet was originally used to treat diabetics, because many diabetics have unstable blood sugar. The benefit of the ketogenic diet is that blood sugar becomes very stable, with daily fluctuations basically not exceeding about one unit. Suppose your normal blood sugar is 5.5; over the course of a day your blood sugar will fluctuate between 6 and 5, not like when you normally eat carbohydrates and your blood sugar spikes and then drops. So your mental state will be very good, without those high and low blood sugar swings; you maintain a consistently good mental state and a clear head.

But there are also drawbacks. This way of eating is not easy to sustain, because when you go to a normal restaurant, they do not have the food you need. The second is that it is not very suitable for business travel; when you travel, this dietary habit is very hard to maintain. There is another issue -- after about half a year or more, occasionally -- maybe once a month or once every two months -- I would suddenly experience a kind of dizziness in the brain, not the dizziness of low blood sugar, but a different kind, each time lasting about 3 to 5 seconds, and the brain felt extremely uncomfortable. After that I observed for several months; I was not sure whether this was caused by the diet, and then I found it probably was related, so I stopped the ketogenic diet, and I am sharing the results of my experience with everyone.

I say this to tell you: the human body has a very strong substitution effect. When you do not eat a certain kind of food, it will naturally substitute. When you believe that this ketogenic diet has no effect on your health, you will do it, and your body will operate that way, breaking down the energy and nutrients you need from a limited range of foods.

He says that normally you need various nutrients -- many different kinds. But within that pattern, within your belief system and within the normal health of the body, if you believe your body can regulate itself, your body has a very large margin, an astonishing capacity for adjustment, and it will automatically use substitutes. The most central substitute here, in the ketogenic diet, is this: the starch and carbohydrates we normally eat ultimately allow cells to absorb something called ATP -- adenosine triphosphate, which is what cells use to obtain energy. But when your body has very little sugar and you do not eat carbohydrates, fat breaks down into something called ketones, and these ketones themselves can also provide energy to cells. That is why it is called the "ketogenic diet" -- it generates ketones. This is the body's substitution ability at work.

At the time I was just curious and wanted to try it, and also because I was too overweight at the time -- nearly two hundred jin. After two or three months on the ketogenic diet, I dropped to around one hundred seventy jin, losing nearly thirty jin, without doing any extra exercise, and my body was very healthy and my mental state was very good. It was just that after seven or eight months I occasionally experienced dizziness, about once every one or two months, with no other adverse symptoms.

Beliefs and Illness: The Suggestion of Food

If you believe in illness, then the best diet plan in the world -- by anyone's standards, the best diet by any standards -- will not make you healthy.

If you believe you are sick, then nothing you eat will help. There are too many examples of this. Look at the emperors of ancient times -- which one of them ate poorly? Look at how many short-lived emperors there were in the Ming dynasty.

Confidence in health can help you utilize a deficient diet to an astonishing degree.

That is, your confidence in health itself can allow you to utilize a diet you consider deficient and monotonous to an astonishing degree. Do not underestimate your human body; the body's capabilities are extremely strong.

If you are convinced that a particular food will bring you a particular illness, then it will indeed do so.

You must remember this sentence. It may seem that a certain vitamin prevents a certain disease; of course, when operating within your framework, this belief itself is indeed effective.

Nowadays people take large amounts of vitamins, health supplements, and multivitamins. A Western doctor might give children in other cultures -- for example, going to Africa, he thinks those children lack vitamin B or vitamin A -- and give some children vitamin injections or pills. These children do not need to know which vitamin they are being given; they do not even know what illness they have, and they cannot even communicate in the same language. But if they believe that the Western doctor is more skilled than their own local healer, then their condition will indeed improve -- once they take it, they really will get better. And from then on, they will need that vitamin. The same goes for all the other children; once that is the case for them, they really do begin to need that vitamin. Before that, they did not need it -- they might have lacked some trace element or something their whole lives, yet they could still live perfectly well.

Seth states again that he is not saying you should not give children vitamins -- when it is time to supplement calcium, supplement calcium; when it is time to supplement vitamin C, supplement vitamin C. Why? Because within your framework, this has already become a necessity. In our clinics, we believe that children lack vitamin D, and that growing bodies need calcium, and that calcium and vitamin D must be taken together, otherwise calcium is not easily absorbed. So this has become a necessary belief system.

Then you will discover more vitamins to cure more diseases.

Under this belief system, you will discover that this vitamin can cure this disease, and that trace element can cure that disease. As long as this system of using vitamins to treat illness is useful, it will be accepted. But the problem is that its effect is not very good -- it does have an effect, because you believe the system works, and so it really does work, but its effect is not very good. The core issue still lies in your beliefs.

If you feel listless yourself, and you happen to read an advertisement or a book about vitamins, and you see that listlessness is caused by a lack of vitamin B -- vitamin B12, B2, and so on, which are said to nourish the spirit -- and then these materials tell you that this is good for the body and the spirit, and you are influenced by it, and you think, "What he says makes sense; vitamin B might really be good for my spirit and helpful to my nervous system," then you will indeed benefit from it, at least for a while. After you take vitamin B, you really will get better -- your belief makes the vitamin effective for you.

But if you insist that the condition of poor health will continue, then the opposite suggestion represented by the vitamin will not be effective in the long run either. That is to say, the premise for a vitamin's effectiveness is that you believe it is effective for you; but this cannot last. If your own belief system has not changed, it cannot be effective in the long term. If you want it to be effective in the long term, you must make corresponding adjustments and changes to your beliefs at the root.

Cigarettes, Drugs, and Suggestion

The same applies to advertisements about cigarettes and psychedelic drugs. The suggestion that smoking causes cancer is far more dangerous than the actual cancer-causing effect of smoking, and it causes cancer in people who otherwise would not have been affected.

Now every country requires that cigarette packs carry a line: smoking is harmful to health, smoking causes cancer. Some countries go even further and directly print images of lungs with lung cancer. The harm of this kind of suggestion is far more serious than the harm actually brought about by smoking itself.

Before there was any awareness of lung cancer, there were also plenty of people who smoked. Even before cigarettes existed, people smoked homegrown tobacco, smoked pipes, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes -- in the countryside the quality of that tobacco was very poor, the big tobacco leaves were harsh and choking, yet people smoked heavily back then too. But at that time the lung cancer rate was not as high as it is now. Back then people did not know about lung cancer, did not know what lung cancer even was. At that time people thought smoking was just smoking; they did not think smoking would kill you. Smoking might cause coughing, but they did not feel there was any connection between smoking and death.

Those well-intentioned public service campaigns about heroin, marijuana, and LSD can also harm people, because they pre-establish the experiences that drug users can have.

They tell you that the final result of using heroin is death, and they pre-establish the dangers of all kinds of drugs -- actually in order to scare you, so that you will not go and take drugs. But on the other hand, your culture also openly points out that taking drugs can produce those exaggerated dangers -- dangers that are often exaggerated. Heroin certainly is dangerous, but the dangers of marijuana may have already been discovered by science to be not that great; these are all exaggerations. And on the other hand, we also use drugs as a method of treatment.

Here there is a difference between English and Chinese: in English, both narcotics and medicine are called "drugs," and often they are not distinguished, but in professional vocabulary the distinction is very clear -- narcotics are narcotics, heroin is heroin, medicine is medicine. In the colloquial speech of many ordinary people, they are all called drugs. When Seth uses the word "drug" here, that is what he means: lumping narcotics and medicine together, because both are produced from chemical preparations.

The danger becomes somewhat like a rite of passage into adulthood, where one must face the possibility of losing one's life before being fully accepted by the community. But those involved in the initiation rites of indigenous peoples understand far better what they are doing than you do. They understand a framework of belief, and they are quite certain about the results within that framework of belief.

This passage, actually many people do not know what it is really trying to say. What he wrote was in the 1970s, when American society was not quite the same as it is now -- it was a time when liberalism was running rampant, when sexual freedom and drug freedom were running rampant. Hippies, decadence -- they not only did not think taking drugs was bad, they even considered taking drugs a kind of fashion, a kind of trendy thing. So in America in the seventies and eighties, especially on high school campuses, taking drugs became an extremely common phenomenon. If you had never smoked marijuana, it seemed you would be embarrassed to even greet people. It is like in China in the eighties and nineties, especially on campuses in the eighties, if a boy did not smoke he seemed like he was still an elementary school student. How do you show that you are not a child anymore, that you have grown up? You do some things that only adults can do, like smoking. In Western society, young people gained acceptance from their teenage peer group by smoking marijuana and participating in drug parties. If you did not fit in, you were not accepted.

What Seth means is that for young people living in America in the seventies, if you wanted to regard yourself as an adult, to move from high school into adult society, you needed to go through a process -- the process of taking drugs. This is not to say that he personally needed it, but rather that the perception of the whole society, the atmosphere on campuses, was like that. And on television every day there were public service ads about the dangers of drugs.

Seth says that this kind of propaganda is actually a kind of suggestion and harm to people, exaggerating the consequences of taking drugs. The main harm of taking drugs is addiction -- that is the greatest harm. As for the harm to the body itself, it does exist; if the dosage keeps increasing and you become addicted to the stuff, then, as Seth specifically discussed earlier regarding LSD and substitute drugs and their devastation of the psyche and the ego, that is truly terrifying. But what he wants to say here is this: it does have bad effects on you, but it is also not as serious as your television propaganda exaggerates it to be.

And at the same time, while you exaggerate the harm of narcotics to the human body, you also tell everyone that taking pills made of these chemical preparations -- what we ordinarily call Western medicine -- is indeed a necessary thing for curing illness. From Seth's point of view, whether it is medicine for treating illness or narcotics, these chemical preparations are the same in nature: they are all artificially synthesized, non-natural substances, and none of them are good for the human body. On the one hand you emphasize the therapeutic effect of these chemical preparations, and on the other hand you exaggerate the harm of another kind of chemical preparation to people. These two together make you form a certain belief about such things, and the consequences of this propaganda cause you to form an invisible suggestion in your daily life, which then really leads to those severe consequences of taking drugs -- because you believe that is how it is.

Then in some indigenous societies and tribes, their initiation rites also have specific ceremonies and activities, but they control them relatively well, using a natural, organic approach. This is a very typical conflict between modern civilization and ancient civilization. In indigenous tribes, there is a process by which a small boy becomes an adult man, but that process is relatively healthier. Your human stuff is not healthy -- you use the method of everyone taking drugs together. In present-day society there is also this phenomenon: among some young people who run with gangs, what counts as maturity? Whether or not they have used methamphetamine has become a mark of maturity within their circle.

What Seth wants to tell you is this: you do not need to concern yourself with those specific cases. What he wants to say is that all of these are natural hypnosis -- your being cured of illness by taking medicine is also a kind of hypnosis, your suffering severe consequences from taking narcotics is also a kind of hypnosis, and this includes healthy eating, green foods -- all of these are hypnosis.

The Stomach Ulcer Example: The Conditioning of Belief

Let us go back to the man with the stomach ulcer we mentioned earlier. He gets an ulcer whenever he eats certain foods. In that example, he secretly believed that certain foods would make his stomach react in a particular way. Then there was a medicine that could relieve his pain, and after taking it his stomach's reaction was not as strong, not as painful. As long as the medicine worked, it convinced him -- convinced him that "eating certain things really does give me stomach ulcers," and that his stomach problem could only be dealt with in this way, only relieved by taking medicine.

This is essentially similar to the woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder we mentioned earlier, who washed her hands twenty to thirty times a day. This man's psychological pattern is: if I eat certain things, my stomach will feel uncomfortable -- that is a psychological suggestion. He is actually afraid of something else, and in order to prevent that thing from happening, he uses this as a substitute. Just as the hand-washer fears the harm of bacteria and viruses and keeps washing her hands out of fear. A normal person's fear is not that intense -- we also worry, and especially now with the virus going around we also wash our hands, but we do not fear to the point of washing twenty to thirty times a day. But the obsessive-compulsive person, even when there is no epidemic, will still wash his hands many, many times -- what he fears is something else.

The stomach ulcer is the same: he is actually anxious and fearful about something. And the medicine becomes an opposite suggestion. If you observe carefully, you will find that people who are genuinely very happy -- not the kind who pretend to be happy or force a smile, but those who are genuinely happy and free of stress -- rarely get stomach ulcers, no matter what they eat. This is a very typical example. Other people, on the other hand, easily get stomach ulcers from anything they eat: cold food is no good, spicy food is no good, stimulating food is no good, sour food is no good, overly sweet food is no good either. In the end he has a list of foods, and eating anything on that list will cause a stomach ulcer. So what can he do? He can only solve it by taking medicine.

This is also a kind of suggestion. The medicine becomes an opposite suggestion -- if I take medicine, my stomach ulcer will get better, my stomach pain will lessen --

And it is all part of the same hypnotic process.

Your getting a stomach ulcer is the result of your psychological suggestion, and your getting better by taking medicine is also the result of a psychological suggestion. Both are forms of natural hypnosis. It is built on your belief in the original illness -- the belief that eating certain things will make you sick, and the belief that taking certain medicine will make you better, which is again your belief about the illness, and it is reflected in your life in just that way.

Although the medicine gives him temporary treatment, the very fact that he needs the medicine strengthens his dependence on it.

If his thought of being in poor health is not stopped, then this will continue -- eating something gives him a stomach ulcer, then taking medicine cures it, and many people maintain this kind of cycle.

Then the medicine can no longer be an adequate method of treatment.

After this continues a few times, you will find that the medicine no longer works. Some illnesses reach a point where medicine cannot cure them, because the root cause has not been resolved.

Then the only seemingly reasonable approach is to avoid eating those foods that bring on stomach ulcers.

It seems there is only one way -- if you do not eat that food, you will not get a stomach ulcer. That is the conclusion your belief finally arrives at.

Yet each time he does this, the individual becomes more and more resigned to the hypnotic suggestion.

The more you dare not eat a certain food, the more you accept that suggestion. You tell others, "I cannot eat this, I get a stomach ulcer whenever I eat it," and you say it all the time -- "I cannot do this, something will happen if I do," "I cannot eat chili peppers, I break out in pimples as soon as I eat them" -- these are all your own suggestions, and they are constantly being reinforced. Does eating chili peppers necessarily give you pimples? Nonsense. Look at the girls in Chongqing and Sichuan -- their skin is incredibly good, and they eat chili peppers every day. In other regions like Guizhou and northern Shaanxi -- oil-splashed chili noodles, oil-splashed hand-pulled noodles -- they eat chili peppers heavily too. Many regions eat chili peppers. Some mountain residents in Fujian eat chili peppers very heavily, often eating them straight with rice. The girls in all these places I have mentioned eat chili peppers every day, cannot enjoy a meal without them, and eat them at every meal -- who among them has a face full of pimples?

So whether chili peppers give you pimples is your belief. If you believe chili peppers cause pimples, then they really will -- even one bite of Lao Gan Ma will give you pimples. It is that simple.

Every time you do this, you reinforce yourself, and the matter becomes a real suggestion. If he gets sick after eating a forbidden food, then he really does get sick. Many people are like this: "I cannot eat this, I cannot eat that," and in fact it becomes so -- the illness is not faked, it is really like that, really an ulcer, really a stomachache, very uncomfortable.

He never thinks of giving up the belief, and realizing that it is the belief itself that, through self-hypnosis, has set up this conditioning process.

Have you ever thought about it? "I cannot eat certain things, and eating certain things will give me some illness" -- this conditioning is caused by your own belief itself, through hypnosis, through self-hypnosis.

The Point of Power Is in the Present

Then we say the point of power is in the present.

This is the key point emphasized throughout this chapter.

You must thoroughly understand this point before you can grasp your life, and then begin to use natural hypnosis to your benefit in all areas of life.

You need to understand that by grasping the point of power in the present, you can resolve all problems of the past and the future. When you understand this, you can use self-hypnosis to its fullest extent, applying it to everything that benefits and helps you.

The parts of your life that you currently find satisfactory are where you have already benefited, where this hypnosis is already at work -- and of course the parts you are dissatisfied with are also where hypnosis is at work. So how can you make life better? Pay more attention to which beliefs produced the satisfactory parts of your life through hypnosis, and what results such beliefs lead to.

For example, some girls feel they are very beautiful. This belief was instilled in them from childhood, and they have never had any doubt about their appearance. When they walk down the street, the boyfriends they meet and other people all praise their looks, and they receive attention and affection from others. They naturally reinforce this belief, truly feel good about themselves, and actually do become more beautiful. This is a typical case.

Pay more attention to the good aspects of your life, and observe which beliefs caused them; then apply similar self-hypnosis to the parts of your life you are dissatisfied with, and make yourself better.

In these situations, do not focus your main attention on the place you are most dissatisfied with.

Do not focus on the places where you feel you are lacking, or on the annoying people and annoying things around you. The more you focus on them, the more they occur -- this only becomes a deepening of suggestion, of hypnotic suggestion. What is called hypnosis is focusing your spirit on something, narrowing the focus of consciousness. The more you concentrate on certain things, the more they intensify, right?

Only remind yourself of your other achievements.

Just look at your own strengths, look at your achievements, and do not keep looking at your shortcomings. This in itself is a constructive method. Even if you do nothing else, it is very beneficial. This practice of focusing your attention on the positive will naturally pull your energy away from problems -- energy is no longer concentrated on negative places, and automatically leaves them. When that negative problem no longer receives energy, the problem disappears on its own. Problems also need energy. When you lose your temper or get angry, that also requires energy. When you no longer care about it, is the problem still a problem? It is no longer one.

Contrasting Eastern and Western Education

You see, the biggest characteristic of Western education is that it is always encouraging. If you have been exposed to comparisons between Eastern and Western education, you will find that the biggest characteristic of Eastern education is constant criticism -- "You are still not as good as so-and-so," "You got into the top three, but you still have not gotten first place," "Compared with first place, there is still a gap"; if you get first place in the class, "This is only first place in our class, you are still not first place in the whole grade"; if you get first place in the whole grade, "You still have not gotten first place in the whole city or county"; once you have done that, "You still have not gotten first place in the whole province." It never sees your strengths, only your weaknesses.

The main characteristic of Western education, which we feel is exaggerated and a bit over the top, is that it sees strengths in everything -- "You are amazing, you are so good, you are so excellent," these words are on their lips every day, said in all sorts of different ways. They praise the child until the child is dizzy, not knowing from day to day just how excellent they are in other people's eyes. What is it actually doing? It has deeply grasped the essence of this matter -- it is instilling in you, suggesting to you, that you are an excellent child.

Because teachers or parents only see the child's weaknesses, you pour energy into the child's weaknesses, and the child will also pour their own energy into those weaknesses. The more you pour in, the more serious the problem becomes. Take a typical example, such as the problem of stuttering. It is normal for children at a certain age to stutter occasionally -- perhaps their thinking and expressive ability is too fast and their mouth cannot keep up; or their vocabulary is insufficient; or their verbal fluency has not been trained over a long period and cannot keep up with the speed of their shifting thoughts. At such times, occasional stuttering is perfectly normal. But many parents say, "No stuttering allowed, just try stuttering one more time," threatening and frightening the child until the child is terrified. Yet everyone knows that the more you deal with him this way, the more he stutters. On the other hand, if you ignore it -- just pretend you did not see it, or treat it as a joke, as something amusing -- it passes. If you treat it as a very serious matter, then too bad, it really will become a very serious matter. People who have experienced stuttering all have this feeling: the more nervous you are, the more you stutter; when you are relaxed, nothing is wrong at all.

The Power of Positive Focus

When you remind yourself of other areas in your experience where you have done well, that is, when you always look at things positively, when you look at your own strengths, you can build up your own sense of worth and power.

Any time you try to free yourself from a difficult situation, make sure you do not instead focus your attention on it.

When you are thinking about solving or getting rid of a difficult situation, make sure you do not focus your attention on that difficult situation.

This action of his cuts off the arrival of other information and reinforces your fixation on the difficulty.

When you put all your energy on the difficulty, this kind of focused fixation is like hypnosis. You cannot see any other information or material; you can only think of the difficulty. This action itself cuts off the source of other information and reinforces the fixation on the difficulty—hypnotizing yourself, becoming narrower. When this fixation is broken, when you stop focusing on the difficulty, your problem is instead solved. Why? Because other solutions, other resources for resolution, new ideas, new channels, new plans automatically emerge. The more you fixate on something, the less you have other options.

Weight Loss: A Contrary Predicament

He gives another very simple example. If you are overweight -- many of us encounter this in real life -- you feel that the weight is a physical fact. Why do you need to lose weight? Surely the weight exceeds a certain standard. For example, for a girl, if her weight for a normal height exceeds 110 jin or reaches 120-plus jin, she will feel, "I am overweight, I am fat." In her mind she has a standard for her own weight -- no more than 100, 90-something jin is best, 100-and-a-little is acceptable, but beyond that it is not okay. She will then believe that she is overweight.

The fact of being overweight, that number, makes you unhappy. Then you completely believe it -- you believe you have already become fat, that you are a little chubby person, that flab and a little belly have already begun to appear, that your waist has already thickened -- you begin to believe all of this. Then you start a whole series of dieting plans: to lose weight you must diet, you must eat less. You build all of this on the concept that "because you eat too much, therefore you are overweight" -- why do you want to lose weight? Precisely because you believe you are fat, because you eat too much. This is your belief: you think you are fat because you eat too much, and if you want not to be fat, then eat less.

But on the other hand --

Conversely, you think you eat too much because you believe you are overweight.

What does this mean? The reason you feel you eat too much -- for example, you feel two bowls of rice is too much, while one bowl is not too much. Who tells you that two bowls is too much? Why is two bowls not just right? It is because you feel you are heavy, you are fat. You first have the idea that "I am already fat," and you believe this fatness is caused by eating too much, so you feel you eat too much. This is self-suggestion: "I eat too much."

Let us go through it again. Your own belief system is: first, I am fat because I eat too much; second, you feel that ordinarily you eat too much. These two together can only keep you fat -- because you feel you eat too much.

Let me give you an example and you will understand. Look at those slender girls; they eat far more than you do. Of course some rely on dieting, but do you know how much many girls can eat? I mean no disrespect -- very healthy, happily eating and drinking freely, eating meat, eating desserts, not avoiding anything. Why? Because from childhood this girl believes her figure is slender, she has never considered herself a fat person, she feels her figure is always normally slender, and she may even feel she is on the thin side. So she just eats, without any taboo at all.

What I mean is, when you say you "eat too much," compared with whom is this "too much"? The reason you feel it is too much is because you feel you are too fat -- if you eat a little you feel it is too much, and if you eat a normal amount you also feel it is too much. But you feel you eat too much, and you also believe eating too much will inevitably make you gain weight. What is the final result? Is this not exactly a vicious cycle? This is a main reason why many people fail at dieting. Many people say, "I gain weight even drinking plain water" -- is it really true that drinking plain water makes you gain weight? No, it is because her belief is that she is fat. Seth has explained so much earlier: your beliefs determine your body -- when you feel you are a fat person, your body's response to you is fatness. If you are convinced you are a little chubby person, then you are a little chubby person; the body must cooperate with your beliefs, fulfill what you wish, and make you into a plump appearance.

The picture you actually see perfectly matches your beliefs.

The result you see is exactly what you thought -- eat too much and gain weight. This is how you ordinarily reinforce your belief. Your belief that you are overweight, that you exceed the standard weight, constrains your body and makes the body express itself in a fat way. Although you say, "I think about losing weight every day, I think about losing weight even in my dreams," when you dig down to the bottom layer of your beliefs, it is actually exactly the opposite, the reverse of what you think.

So in the strangest way, your dieting only reinforces the condition.

Strange, is it not? If you do not diet, it is fine; the more you diet, the more weight you gain. Many people say, "I diet every day, and instead of losing weight I gained two jin." Why? Because since you decide to diet, the premise is that you already believe in the fact that you are fat. Deep in your heart you have already concluded that you are fat, so naturally you are a fat person.

You will simply continue to utilize your food in the same way, and to overeat, until you change your beliefs.

A temporary increase in weight will not last, and your entire behavior pattern will operate according to the strong hypnotic suggestion you have given yourself -- your appearance and experience will of course always reinforce your beliefs. The moment you look in the mirror and see you are still fat, you firmly believe that "being fat is the fact." "Then I cannot help but admit this fact, I am fat, so that is why I need to diet" -- the premise of your dieting is that you believe you are fat, and if you believe you are fat, will dieting be effective? No. Is it not like a curse?

Then how can you become thin?

You must therefore willingly suspend this idea, and with the exercises given in this chapter, you must consciously endeavor to insert a different belief, and then utilize natural hypnosis in this new way.

What belief should you let go of? Let go of the belief that you are a fat person, the belief that you are overweight -- let it go. Then use the exercises given in this chapter -- the meditation mentioned earlier, that 5-to-10-minute exercise, combined with an action to organize it. Insert a different belief, and use natural hypnosis in a new way -- your becoming fat was also the result of your own hypnosis, and if you want to become thin you must use the same hypnotic method. How did you become fat in the first place? You believed you were fat. Go interview those slender girls; deep in their hearts they feel they are thin, and they never have any doubt or worry about their figures. You say, "Of course they are thin, so they do not worry; I worry only after I became fat" -- are you not reversing cause and effect? Only when you yourself have confidence in your figure, firmly believe you are a slender person, firmly believe you are not fat at all, can you finally manifest the reality that you are not fat. If you admit you are a fat person, then how can you keep losing?

The earlier method has already been told to you in the previous sessions: every day use 5 to 10 minutes, and within these 5 to 10 minutes instill in yourself one sentence or one concept -- "I am a slender girl, my figure is great." You can use the method of imagined images, imagining the image of the goddess with the best figure that you like, visualizing it every day; or use the verbal method, the descriptive method. Seth says whichever method is more natural for you is fine, whichever is more vivid and more immersive is fine -- one sentence, one slogan, one phrase will do. Just use 5 to 10 minutes to hypnotize yourself in this way. Do not worry about how much you currently weigh, do not worry about whether you are fat or not, set it completely aside and do not look at it, and do not step on the scale every day -- put the scale away and toss it aside. Every day spend 5 to 10 minutes, in the morning, meditating on your most perfect image.

Then after reading this book, if you realize your own worth, that present realization can negate any ideas of your unworthiness that may have attracted you to that condition.

What does it mean to realize your own worth? It means knowing you have such great ability, knowing your own power. What does it mean to have no worth? It means feeling completely defeated in the matter of losing weight, completely powerless -- no matter how you diet you do not succeed, you have tried countless times and it never works, and you feel you have no worth. Seth says, when you realize the concepts this book has given you, when you accept this viewpoint, you feel you are very powerful. The present moment is your point of power; you use this present point to act.

How do you act? It is actually very simple: in the world of probabilities, there is a not-fat you, and there is a fat you. You merely adjust your beliefs to that channel -- it is equivalent to changing the past, and changing the past changes your present. When you hypnotize yourself to a certain degree, you will naturally become closer and closer to that not-fat, slender image of yourself, because you are constantly changing your past.

Weight Gain: The Opposite Example

Conversely, some people are underweight. I have seen girls who are underweight and try every day to gain weight; men too, with waists even thinner than girls' -- a waist of nineteen or eighteen inches, a grown man who might weigh only a little over a hundred pounds or a hundred and ten pounds, like a bean sprout. The same principle applies here as well.

You can go through a period of eating a huge amount of food, just to gain a few pounds.

There was a stretch when I ate and drank like crazy every day, and no matter how much you want to gain weight, you just cannot. Some people say they cannot believe there are people in the world who cannot gain weight -- like a joke I saw on Douyin the other day: "I am very confident; if I want to gain weight, I can gain weight, and if I want to get even fatter, I can get even fatter." But some people who want to gain weight truly cannot, and you have not experienced their suffering. That thin person, as if malnourished and underdeveloped, makes all kinds of excuses for not eating -- this he does not like, that he is unwilling to eat, no appetite today, no mood tomorrow, this does not taste good, that is not nutritious -- in any case, all sorts of reasons not to eat. Others may give you the most nourishing, most nutritious food, yet you still cannot gain weight.

You are not underweight because you do not eat enough or do not absorb well; on the contrary, it is because you believe you are underweight that you do not eat enough.

The reason you are thin or overly thin is precisely because you believe you are underweight. You say, "I do not eat enough, and that is why I am so thin" -- well, go look at those people on weight-loss diets; they eat so little in a day -- in the evening they have a cucumber, a tomato, an apple, and then nothing else. Are they thin? Which of those dieters is thin? They eat far less than you do, so why can they all gain weight, while you eat more than they do and still cannot gain weight? It is the reverse of the weight-loss principle we just discussed -- it is because you think you are thin, that you are underweight, that you are malnourished. You believe you are light in weight, and that is why you want to eat more -- you think eating more is the only way to gain weight. Actually, that is not the case; eating more does not help, because you yourself feel thin, and that belief decides the outcome.

Here Seth uses one positive and one negative example -- weight loss and weight gain, two completely opposite beliefs -- to have us examine and observe our psychological suggestions -- the role our belief system plays in daily life. These two things are probably something almost everyone has experienced to a greater or lesser degree. Some people may never have experienced them, but many have experienced them to some extent.

No amount of food will be enough until you change the belief.

If your belief does not change, no matter how much you eat, you will not gain weight. What should you do?

You should use the same method just given for those who are overweight. In each case, the body's conditioning is established through natural hypnosis.

Use the same method as for weight loss -- meditate, hypnotize yourself, imagine yourself at a standard weight, and firmly believe in that.

Once you understand these two matters of being fat and thin, can you also understand the principles behind illness? Being fat or thin is something we can see and touch, but illness inside the body may be invisible to you -- yet is the mechanism at work not the same? Does it not all operate under the influence of self-hypnosis?

Pay Attention to Your Daily Thoughts

His daily behavior and the chemical processes within his body smoothly follow your beliefs.

This sentence is very important. He has emphasized it many times before. Your daily behavior and the chemical processes within your body—including how you absorb food, how you process food, how you utilize food, including the hormones in your body, the bacterial colonies in your gut, and the absorption capacity of your probiotics—will all follow your beliefs, will follow along with your beliefs.

Here the idea of value is also involved, as well as the point of power mentioned earlier. In any area, in any field, in any respect, simply by paying more attention to all the meaningful thoughts you have throughout a day, you can obtain great clues.

That is to say, when you pay more attention to your own thoughts, when you know what your true beliefs are, what your conscious thoughts really are—when you pay attention to your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts—you can obtain great clues. What kind of clues? Whether you actually think of yourself as fat or thin—that is the key.

Every thought carries a subtle hint.

When you observe your conscious thoughts each day, you will rediscover certain clues. These clues will alter your behavior patterns and thereby affect your body. You need to find, from among these conscious beliefs, which beliefs have influenced you and led to the results you have today, and then find, from these observations, the methods for change, the opportunities for change. You must ordinarily pay attention to observing these things in yourself in order to obtain these clues.

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose) ↩

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. This claim could not be verified. ↩

5. This claim could not be verified. ↩

6. According to Mike's original words, "its annual social medical costs account for about 22% of the entire GDP"; upon verification, it should be "total U.S. health care spending accounts for about 18% of GDP ($5.3 trillion in 2024, 18.0% of GDP), not 22%." (Source: U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) "National Health Expenditure Data — Historical," https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/historical) ↩

7. Source: U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) "National Health Expenditure Data — NHE Fact Sheet" (https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/nhe-fact-sheet) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. Source: Wikipedia "American Medical Association" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E5%8C%BB%E5%AD%A6%E4%BC%9A) ↩

10. Source: American Cancer Society "Our History" (https://www.cancer.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history.html) ↩

11. According to Mike's original words, "women at 55 and men at 60, that is the statutory retirement age"; upon verification, it should be "China's original statutory retirement age was 60 for male workers, 55 for female cadres, and 50 for female workers, and starting January 1, 2025, it will be gradually raised over 15 years to 63 for men, 58 for female cadres, and 55 for female workers." (Source: Library of Congress "China: National Legislature Adopts Decision to Gradually Raise Retirement Ages," https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2024-10-17/china-national-legislature-adopts-decision-to-gradually-raise-retirement-ages/) ↩

12. According to Mike's original words, "in the U.S. you can retire at 62, but you only get 80% of your pension; it seems if you retire at 67, you can get 100% of your pension until death"; upon verification, it should be "the correct statement about U.S. Social Security is: the full retirement age for those born in 1960 or later is 67, and claiming at 67 gives you 100%; you can start as early as 62, but benefits are permanently reduced by 30%, meaning you receive only about 70% (not 80%)." (Source: U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) "Benefits Planner: Retirement — Born in 1960 or Later," https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/1960.html) ↩

13. According to Mike's original words, "after age 60 they won't let you take the driver's license test, but if you already have a license you can keep driving, and it seems after 70 they won't let you drive either"; upon verification, it should be "since November 20, 2020, China has removed the upper age limit of 70 for applying for driver's licenses for small cars, small automatic cars, and mopeds; neither age 60 nor 70 prohibits taking the test or continuing to drive, and those aged 70 or above applying or undergoing review must pass tests of memory, judgment, and reaction and submit a physical condition certificate annually." (Source: Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China "Ministry of Public Security: Relaxing the application age for small car driver's licenses, removing the upper age limit of 70," https://www.mps.gov.cn/n2254536/n2254544/n2254552/n7469517/n7469538/c7472444/content.html) ↩

14. According to Mike's original words, "a couple of years ago scientists discovered through a series of observational studies that lard is actually the best for the human body, and then ranked lard fourth or second among the hundred healthiest foods for humans"; upon verification, it should be "in the BBC Future list of the '100 most nutritious foods' based on nutritional data from over a thousand raw foods, lard (pig fat) ranked 8th with a nutritional score of about 73–74, not 2nd or 4th." (Source: Wikipedia "Pig fat," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_fat) ↩

15. This claim could not be verified. ↩

16. This claim could not be verified. ↩

17. This claim could not be verified. ↩

18. Source: CNBC "Ashton Kutcher tried Steve Jobs' all-fruit diet — and it didn't go well" (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/ashton-kutcher-steve-jobs-fruit-diet-health-effects.html) ↩

19. According to Mike's original words, "he got pancreatic cancer in his forties, then after an operation seemed to recover, and after about ten years or so, or a dozen years, he died in his early fifties, still from a recurrence of pancreatic cancer"; upon verification, it should be "Jobs was diagnosed with a rare pancreatic (neuroendocrine) tumor in 2003 at age 48, had surgery to remove it in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009, and died on October 5, 2011, at age 56 from complications of pancreatic cancer — about 8 years after diagnosis, not a dozen years, and not in his early fifties." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "Steve Jobs," https://www.britannica.com/money/Steve-Jobs) ↩

20. Source: The Palace Museum "Qing Dynasty Court Diet" (https://www.dpm.org.cn/court/culture/157158.html) ↩

21. This claim could not be verified. ↩

22. This claim could not be verified. ↩

23. According to Mike's original words, "Bama is called a longevity village, the whole township is long-lived, and centenarians are everywhere"; upon verification, it should be "Bama is a county-level administrative division (Bama Yao Autonomous County, Hechi, Guangxi), not a township. Although it is recognized as a world longevity area, centenarians are not everywhere — in the seventh national census, the county's resident population was 236,152, with 102 people aged 100 or above, about 43 per 100,000 (0.04%), which is 5.7 times the international longevity area standard of 7.5 per 100,000." (Source: People's Government of Bama Yao Autonomous County, Hechi, Guangxi "Interpretation of the Main Data Bulletin of the Seventh National Population Census of Bama Yao Autonomous County," http://www.bama.gov.cn/sjfb/tjgb/t9295862.shtml) ↩

24. This claim could not be verified. ↩

25. Source: Michelle M. Chen et al. "Trends in thyroid cancer incidence and overdiagnosis in the USA" (The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, February) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(24)00343-7/abstract) ↩