“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the first essay I referred to Jane’s unique combination of stubbornness, innocence, and mysticism, and in that respect nothing has changed. In spite of her horror at the medical practices and suggestions she’s encountered, and in spite of her dismay at the physical damage the arthritis has caused in her temporal body, Jane will give up nothing until she—and/or her whole self—get out of the entire illness syndrome exactly what she wants to get. She has an incredible stubborn patience with physical life. This quality has sustained her throughout all of her challenges as well as her successes, and I think it must have been particularly important during her early frightening years with her mother, Marie. Her determination even shows somehow in photographs taken when she was of preschool age. Jane learned to refuse to strike back at the invalid Marie’s rage and sarcasm, to inhibit her spontaneity and impulses, and so habits of repression entered in. Yet she was—and is—free of guile and sophistication.

She’s also done her first two colored-ink sketches, using one of the 4” × 6” watercolor pads I’d bought for her last year. In these sketches, with their simple but very effective patterns of line and primary colors, Jane somehow bypasses her everyday challenges and very clearly reflects her basically mystical view of the world. She does the same with the little poems she’s worked upon, most of which she regards as being not only incomplete but quite inconsequential: “I wouldn’t even type them up, like you did,” she commented. Yet I like lines like: “Let the dirge be heard, sweeping all things before it,” and: “I’ve developed a sense of death, when someone takes a few steps off the known path almost unknowing,” and: “I breathed in the public air and it became private.” Jane also sings in Sumari occasionally, and has written down a few short songs in that “language” without translating them. I’ve been careful to collect for our own records the prose, sketches, poetry, and Sumari she’s produced during this time of healing and testing.

She has a lesser degree of double vision these days, but still may require surgery to correct imbalances in her optic muscles. An experimental treatment that’s just been announced, involving injections into certain eye muscles of a drug derived from the toxin of botulism, may ultimately benefit her; the procedure, which apparently has no side effects, can eliminate the need for surgery by encouraging the realignment of the eyes. Jane is still very much against drugs and surgery, though—even while she’s well aware of the contradictions in her beliefs as she continues to take daily the synthetic thyroid hormone and the liquid salicylate medication prescribed by Dr. Mandali. In his session for April 16 (see the essay for the same date), Seth told us that on several occasions Jane’s thyroid gland has “repaired itself,” but we don’t think that has fully happened yet this time. In a recent private session (for May 10) Seth told us: “The gland is activating itself by itself—off and on, so to speak, giving a sputtering effect. Overall, the body is exploring the best rhythm of metabolism, and fitting itself in with the medication.”

Jane rejected that total at once, feeling it’s far too high, and announced that she’ll probably go back to her old routine of eight to ten aspirin a day. We’re angry and dismayed. It’s very unsettling for us to learn that the prescribed medication isn’t doing its job after all. It is, I remarked somewhat bitterly, another sign of the frustrating, mixed results one must learn to expect, at least in some instances, from the imperfect practice of medicine. To treat rheumatoid arthritis with aspirin? We’d always found that incredible. Yet it’s still the best way to go, Dr. Mandali said, even with the new anti-inflammatory, nonsteroidal drugs that the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) has released to the marketplace recently, for often they produce more side effects than aspirin. And her advice is reinforced by published material I’ve collected lately for our files.

It seems that once again we must learn the hard way that in Jane’s case any improvements we achieve are going to come from within ourselves (for I’m certainly as involved in and “responsible” for her illnesses as she is). That such feelings are rearoused in us at this time is hardly coincidental in view of our lifelong habits and belief systems; our tendencies toward secretiveness and our desires to be as self-sufficient as possible—even with Jane’s very dependent situation. Different modes of behavior don’t fit our chosen courses of action in physical life “this time.” Once again I note that in my opinion Jane’s dependency represents, at least in part, a search for a “redemption” that encompasses other motivations and realities than those concerned with “just” our temporal lives; that indeed, her impaired state grew out of her mystical nature itself (but was hardly caused by it!).

I should add that I don’t think Jane has started to “set … aside” the medical interpretation regarding her “arthritis situation,” as Seth suggested she might do when he came through on April 12. (That session is presented in the essay for April 16.) Any decision Jane makes about altering the deeply set beliefs involved in her condition will require the cooperation of a number of portions of her psyche, including her sinful self, and it appears that at this time neither of us is ready to try achieving that kind of overall effect. Our fear of failure undoubtedly plays a strong part here. Ironically, Jane’s sinful self is one of the main creators of and participants in her illness syndrome, so any beneficial changes she can bring about will first call for a major shift in the attitude of that very stubborn portion of her psyche. It will be a triumph indeed if and when we can create an alteration like that. And all of this presupposes that each of us will be ready to draw “new facts” into our daily lives from Framework 2.