“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I even think there’s good medical evidence these days for my view of Jane’s “symptoms,” as we’ve called them for many years. In recent years rheumatoid arthritis has been found to be an amazingly complicated disease involving a great number of the body’s immune factors. In the progression of rheumatoid arthritis one’s own immunologic system turns on the body and damages it. A very simplified explanation is that in a process repeated over and over, a variety of defender cells called phagocytic monocytes turn into macrophages, or scavenger cells that, in turn, release enzymes which consume healthy joint tissue. The resulting debris attracts more monocytes, and so on. An inflammatory accumulation of cellular detritus finally destroys the joint’s cartilage and eats away bone.

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.)