“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the first essay I described how Dr. Mandali had told Jane that her thyroid gland had “simply ceased functioning,” and how the doctor had started to cautiously rejuvenate my wife’s endocrine system with 50 micrograms daily of a synthetic thyroid hormone. Jane is supposed to take these pills in some still-to-be-determined strength for the rest of her life (although in his session for April 16 Seth had explained that her thyroid gland “has repaired itself” on several occasions; see the essay for the same date.)

After nine weeks, however, Jane and I are more than ready for an increase in the strength of the pills, for she obviously needs the boost. I’ve mentioned several times her dozing or falling asleep outright in her chair. Dr. Mandali agrees that the low thyroid activity is directly related to these episodes. Yet there’s more involved with the dozing—effects I haven’t gone into yet, and can only briefly refer to here. We haven’t discussed these with her doctor, either—clear signs of the secretive aspects of our own natures—but Jane believes she’s had a number of part-hallucinatory, part-psychic experiences as a result of the thyroid-medication situation.

“I’ve had several new experiences with altered states of consciousness,” she wrote in labored script, “and these are quite different than anything I’ve done before. For this reason they are difficult to classify….” Also, she’s indulged in long conversations with me—and on occasion with certain friends—when we apparently were present in out-of-body states. Related here are actions she thought she was participating in with me, say, yet when she “woke up,” she discovered we hadn’t done any of those things. She’s referred often to “gaps in my consciousness” while dozing. “I don’t know what I was doing in my chair,” she said at 11:05 A.M. yesterday; she’d fallen asleep after telling me she had to use the commode. “I don’t like the way the thyroid business is making me feel…. I feel like I’m in your way, or in life’s way….” She had certainly been depressed on that occasion, and I’d tried to cheer her up.

In addition, Jane has described some unique versions of out-of-body episodes that have grown out of the thyroid-medication connection. These haven’t been like the typical experience, wherein she’d feel her psyche rising out of a physical organism that was securely anchored by gravity to her chair to the floor, for example. Instead, she had felt her body in the chair lift most convincingly toward the ceiling…. Sometimes those events became curious indeed—for in her chair Jane flipped over and approached the ceiling of our bedroom feet first. Below her, then, was an upside-down television screen, and a pair of windows with the café curtains at the top instead of the bottom. Not only that, but with her double vision Jane sometimes saw two television screens and four windows! She hasn’t seen her own body sitting below her yet, though, as can happen in the out-of-body state, and she hasn’t seen or talked with any deceased individuals.