“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

ESSAY 6
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 1982

(8:47 A.M. Our original idea was to insert the session Jane gave this morning in one of the earlier essays. This would have been a very mechanical approach. More, it would have involved altering dates, and changing or eliminating some of the copy to make the rest of it fit—all things I dislike doing. After Jane came through with her dictation I told myself I’d know what to do with it, and awoke the next morning with the clear understanding that her session should be presented just as is, and when we received it. Jane said okay. The subjects discussed are deeply charged for us, and the physical and psychological aspects of some of them could be devastating if we allowed them to be. Presenting the session in a more isolated manner here, then, may give the reader a clearer idea of how we felt during Jane’s early days in the hospital [and later too, for that matter]. This course also lets the session serve as an automatic bridge to some of the material in the earlier essays.

As I wrote in the first essay, “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.” Even if Jane had all of those operations—even if she ended up able to walk after a fashion—she’d still have arthritis. She was suffused with it. Our beliefs said so. So did her body, as everyone could see. “Your joints are destroyed,” Dr. Mandali told Jane, after getting the opinion of the young out-of-town rheumatologist she’d asked to examine my wife. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life inside, in a wheelchair? That’s a pretty limited existence you’re talking about there….” And Jane, trying to protect herself from the negative suggestions that had been administered to her like psychic hammerblows, ever since she’d entered the hospital, could only weakly demur on the subject of operations.