“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane’s hearing is much improved after treatment with decongestants and a pair of minor operations in which tiny drainage tubes were inserted through her eardrums—the procedure is called surery—to relieve internal blockage. Jane’s thyroid gland, Dr. Mandali finally told her, has simply ceased functioning, so the doctor has begun a program of cautiously rejuvenating my wife’s endocrine system, and thus all of her bodily processes, with a synthetic thyroid hormone in pill form (a low 50 micrograms to start). Jane is to take these pills for the rest of her life. At least that’s the current prognosis. Her double vision is not as severe and is supposed to keep improving as the hormone takes effect. Dr. Mandali has prescribed drops to keep Jane’s eyes lubricated, and a liquid salicylate medication (as a substitute for aspirin) to control joint pain and inflammation. Both of these products are taken four times a day. The increased glandular activity is also expected to have some beneficial effects upon Jane’s arthritis, and possibly upon her anemia (a condition that often accompanies arthritis). I asked that she be tested for food allergies, since I’d read that reactions to various foods and additives can trigger arthritis, but Dr. Mandali said that “if Jane is allergic she (Jane) would know it”—a position I came to most thoroughly disagree with. But usually, I thought, the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it. Such is the state of the art of medicine in this case, unfortunately.

(7:20.) It is impossible in our time scheme to intellectually know our own potentials without trying them out, without testing them against the world’s edges. We must activate our impulses and desires, try out our abilities, seek out our strengths by joyfully advancing into the given world of physical energy, physical time and space. In the development of each individual we act and reenact the startling events that brought our own universe into existence. The universe was not created in some dim past, but is newly recreated by our own thoughts, dreams, and desires—so that reality happens at all possible levels at once. And in that living endeavor we each play our part.

In our other books I’d mentioned my physical symptoms now and then. By the time Seth finished dictating Dreams last month (on February 8), however, my physical condition had deteriorated. Two weeks later I could hardly get out of my chair onto the couch or the bed. After answering approximately 50 letters one weekend, the next weekend I could barely hold a pen to write my name. Soon afterward my hearing began to fade, then suddenly became blocked. A few days later I wound up in the emergency room of one of our local hospitals—and there, all too quickly I became familiar with the medical profession’s battery of testing paraphernalia. (Long pause.) I was placed in a CAT scanner, my bare backside pressed painfully against a cold metal table, my head encircled by the strange doughnut, or globe, while bright white lights and numbers, it seemed, flashed everywhere. They only X-rayed my head.

(With a laugh at 7:51:) Later that same bare backside, thin and bony, was pressed against another metal table, while this time electrodes were attached to every available area of my head so that an electroencephalogram could be taken. No instructions were given to me except to close my eyes as the test progressed. (Pause.) Some kind of white gum, or glue, had been rubbed into my scalp through my hair to improve the electrical contacts, and when the test was finished the attendant simply grabbed one area of the equipment and pulled the entire mess off my head in one motion—which felt like my entire scalp was coming off. The obvious unconcern on the part of that middle-aged female attendant made me furious.

“Value fulfillment?” I thought. “What the hell am I letting myself in for? And how have the events of my life come to such a turn?” This was, of course, as anyone familiar with hospitals knows, only the beginning. There were numberless blood tests. I also had to be lifted onto and off the bed, onto and off the portable commode.

(8:21.) In this book, Seth does discuss to some degree the nature of certain illnesses as they apply to individual life and genetic survival. And there I lay in the hospital for a full month, with physical survival uppermost in my mind—hardly a coincidence. They told me that my thyroid gland was very underactive, and that I had arthritis. They X-rayed my hands but not my knees. One of the blood tests showed that I was slightly anemic. But other tests and X-rays revealed that I had sound lungs—in spite of my smoking—a good heart and stomach and other organs. I laughed.