“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This isn’t all, however, for experiments have now shown that the brain/mind connection can influence immunity, through stressful conditioning either enhancing its effects or subduing them. Until a very few years ago it was medical dogma that the immune system was entirely independent of any “outside” influence. But recently certain brain chemicals were discovered paired off with cellular chemical “receptors” in the immune system, and researchers expect to find many more of these associations. In physical terms, then, I think it quite possible that in Jane’s case long-term stress, beginning in her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system. Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter’s birth had caused the mother’s illness. Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine/bowel that is often associated with emotional stress. By her early teens she had an overactive thyroid gland. Marie—and others—told her that she would burn herself out and die before she was 20 years old. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). Finally in her mid-30s there came the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane’s immune system greatly increased its attack upon her body.

(I believe that current medical thinking about the immune system and arthritis will be much enlarged upon by the time this book is published, though I haven’t given that much thought to just what new information may be acquired. However, I do think I’m accurate concerning the connections between Jane’s early psychological conditioning and her present challenges.)

In these last few pages (since I began discussing my beliefs about Jane’s early psychological conditioning), I’ve indicated the only kind of thinking by which I can personally make sense out of our world these days. Particularly when I consider the “news” on the typical front page of the typical daily newspaper: All too accurately the “stories” of war, pollution, corruption, and poverty and crime show just how little we human beings know or understand ourselves at this time—and how far we have to go, individually and en masse. As the years have passed, I’ve come to trust more and more my own insights into our behavior as a species within the framework of a nature that I believe our kind has co-created with every other species on the planet (to confine my theme to just our immediate environment for the moment). It all seems very complicated, certainly, but as I manipulate in everyday life I don’t consciously dwell upon all of the ramifications I’ve mentioned in these essays. Instead I try to hold them in the back of my mind as parts of a greater whole. So, I believe, does Jane.

I’ve written these passages knowing, of course, that many of Seth’s points and our own are at best theories, if very intriguing ones. Some may contend that they’re not even theories, but only hypotheses—tentatively inferred explanations requiring much further experimentation and examination. Worse still (I write with some humor), they may “only” be ideas. Whatever their status, Jane and I take heart from the letters sent us by many thousands of readers, who have time and again explained how they put the Seth material to use in very positive physical and mental ways. (Except for a few early instances when we inadvertently lost some of our correspondence, we’ve saved all of it. The cartons are piling up in a cellar storeroom. We hope that eventually our “fan mail” will serve as the foundation for a study concerning the ways in which society reacts to new ideas, through the viewpoints, say, of science, philosophy and psychology, religion, the “occult,” skepticism, generalized deep curiosity, and mental illness. Very abusive responses are also involved, as well as surprising near-illiterate ones.)