“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s ideas — and mine, too — have matured considerably since I wrote a month ago that she was thinking of converting half of our garage into a writing room, with its attendant back porch. In fact, we’ve agreed to go ahead with that project this summer. It will certainly be a long and noisy endeavor. Now that he’s finished the front porch, our contractor is free to begin work at the back of the house as soon as possible.)

Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. Any or all of the above beliefs are held by various systems of thought. All of these, however, strain the individual’s biological sense of integrity, reinforce ideas of danger, and shrink the area of psychological safety that is necessary to maintain the quality possible in life. The body’s defense systems become confused to varying degrees.

I do not intend to give a treatise upon the biological structures of the body and their interworkings, but only to add such information in that line that is not currently known, and is otherwise important to the ideas I have in mind. I am far more concerned [with] more basic issues. The body’s defenses will take care of themselves if they are allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true “carriers” of disease.

Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality.

All of our possessions were in Elmira. To convert to trailer living meant that we’d have to dispose of most of what we owned, including paintings and manuscripts, furniture, files, books, and many written records — something we probably couldn’t have brought ourselves to do. And how could we go to Florida and leave all of our friends, and how inconvenient would it be to deal with a publisher (Prentice-Hall) headquartered way up north in New Jersey? Jane was much more willing to attempt the move than I was, but I think we knew all along that beneath our questions and feelings the idea of moving was more like a shared dream, or a probable reality we chose not to explore during our current physical lives. Jane’s mother was to die within three months of our return home, mine over a year later (in November 1973).