“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

During the last couple of weeks David hadn’t made his regular trips up the hill, but Jane and I were so busy that that fact nearly escaped us. Last Thursday morning, then, we were really shocked when Doris, who is also a teacher and a friend from those apartment-house years, called to tell us that David was in the hospital—that he was to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery the next day. Jane and I couldn’t believe it. We’d thought David was in excellent health. He’d taken up jogging some time ago and was now running 15 miles at a time, three days a week. As he lay in the hospital, David asked Doris why this was happening to him, when he’d tried to take care of himself, help others, and “do everything right.”

David is recovering well from his surgery now, but cannot have visitors yet. Jane has called the hospital each day to ask about him; she’s putting together for him a unique, evocative little book of poetry and paintings. I’m running errands for David, and eventually will be taking him home from the hospital.

Now: Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself. A man might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his father.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation—and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church’s concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined) come from God—an unwelcome gift, perhaps—but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

Did those “genetically inferior,” for example, have the right to reproduce?¹ Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The “new” Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then—as it is now—widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality, and trick it into illness and disaster.

Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified suffering, elevated it to [be] one of the prime virtues—and it has degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or seeing the insane as less than human. So there are many issues involved.

“You didn’t seem to want to take one.” But also, I’d become so interested in the session that I forgot everything else. My right hand was tired now, though.