“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.)

1. When Seth came through with “You get what you concentrate upon,” I remembered that he’d first spoken that sentence some years ago — and that soon afterward I’d made a little paper sign bearing those words and taped it to a wall in one of the two apartments we occupied in Elmira, New York. Had I dated the excerpt? I knew that a few years later the sign had accompanied us on our move to the hill house just outside the city, where we live now. After tonight’s session I found it — again upon a wall — with the date: February 26, 1972. From our records I learned that I’d taken Seth’s quotation from a personal session Jane held while we were on vacation in Marathon, a resort community in the Florida Keys.

The session had been an impromptu one, and developed on our last night in Marathon because we’d been worrying about our goals in life, and how significant a part the Seth material might play in our affairs. We’d felt strong attractions toward what seemed to be a simpler, more open and pleasant life in the Keys, where the weather was excellent all year, and living in a trailer was an accepted way of life. Yet we didn’t think we could afford it. The Seth Material had been published in mid-1970, but sales were slow, and Seth Speaks wasn’t out yet; we’d just finished correcting the page proofs for that work. I’d given up my commercial art job before we went on vacation, and didn’t know what I’d end up doing, besides helping Jane as much as I could.

As I suppose is almost always the case with tourists in romantic, faraway places, we had many ties back home. Although Jane’s father, and my own, had died the previous year (in 1971), our mothers were still living: Jane’s in a nursing home in upstate New York, and mine at the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania, which is only 18 miles from Elmira and just south of the New York State border. (While Jane and I were away my mother stayed with one of my brothers, who lives some 60 miles below Sayre.)

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).

2. As Jane wrote for this note: “We think that the dangers of negative suggestion are as real as the physical ones that are connected with the overuse of X-rays, say. Certainly some women have uncovered cancers through self-examinations, and in so doing perhaps saved their lives. There’s no way of knowing, though, what part negative suggestion might have played in their diseased conditions to begin with.

Seth didn’t mention it in the session tonight, but Jane and I find it extremely interesting that just last week much national publicity was given to the ongoing two-year-old controversy among cancer specialists over whether women — especially those under 50 years of age — should be given routine mammograms (X-ray examinations) in efforts to detect breast cancer in its early stages.

Even when resorted to, prophylactic mastectomies are not foolproof, for a few women have still developed cancer in the area of the nipple. What Jane and I are very curious about, however, is how many “statistically vulnerable” women submitted to operations they didn’t need — for surely a significant number of them wouldn’t have developed cancer in the first place. The percentage is unknowable, of course. If it could be shown that most of the “high risk” women would get cancer, there wouldn’t be arguments about whether such mastectomies are of general value. As things are, though, because of the controversy women once again end up confused as to who is right and what to do. Large scale studies, including one by the National Cancer Institute, are planned to explore the whole question of prophylactic mastectomies.

I’ll conclude this note by making three quick points. The first is that other agencies and individuals in the medical and psychological fields are conducting studies of the ties that exist between emotional states and cancer. The second is that Jane and I are perfectly aware of all the good things that medical science has contributed to our worldwide civilization; given our species’ present collective beliefs about the vulnerability of the individual to outside forces, medicine as it’s now practiced is a vital component of that civilization. The third point is that with his views, Seth is simply trying to open our eyes to a much wider understanding of human capacities.

Apropos of that final item, Jane and I refer the reader to the entire last session. For in it Seth not only discussed the body’s natural defenses and how it “immunizes itself,” but also examined our negative cultural beliefs about the body and disease. We think his material is so good that it deserves more than one reading.