1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 5 sunday april 18 1982" AND stemmed:would)
(9:03 A.M. Last night Jane had pronounced her work finished on the introductory material for Dreams. I hadn’t said so, but I’d suspected that she had more to say. Then as we went to bed she brought up two additional subjects to discuss, for those who would wonder: why we hadn’t more actively sought medical help in the past for her physical condition; and the many private, or deleted, sessions Seth himself has given for her over the years.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
Since the later 1960s, when my own troubles began, I stubbornly resisted medical assistance. If I had broken a leg I would have gone to a doctor to get it set. I felt that I could handle my particular kind of difficulty alone. (Long pause.) The symptoms were obvious enough: stiffness, slowing down of motion, and general lack of mobility. I could keep track easily enough, I thought, of my own progress as I worked directly with my body, without drugs to confuse the issue, and with no one else between me and the reality I had so cunningly created. How else could I really learn anything? The more middlemen that I entertained between my physical condition and my personal beliefs, the more confused I thought I’d be.
(Long pause at 9:21.) I’m not sure where I drew the line. If I’d felt I was suffering a heart attack, for example, I knew I would rush to the hospital, but this was a chronic condition. The diagnosis—which I mentioned in my first session (on April 1)—gave a pinpointed, specific cause: a severely underactive thyroid gland, a situation that in no way contradicts Seth’s own larger interpretation of my physical state.
[... 9 paragraphs ...]
After all, if he does come through others—or can if he wants to—why hasn’t Seth himself simply said so, and repeatedly, in the books as we’ve published them over the years? We’d have respected his statements on that aspect of his abilities and intents as much as we did—and do—on any other. To have attempted to censor Seth since 1963, say, to “keep him to ourselves” on that particular subject, would have long ago turned into an impossibly complicated and dishonest task: Jane and I would have become involved in a constant distortion of his material as we rewrote the sessions. Such a procedure could have turned into a creative tragedy for us and for our readers.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]