“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Your “medical commercials” are equally disease-promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.

Headache remedies are a case in point here. Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body’s natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. Nowhere in your television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy. Medical statistics deal with the diseased. Studies upon the healthy are not carried out.

The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows your body far better than you. Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with your economic and cultural structures, so you cannot lay the blame upon medical men or their profession alone. Your economic well-being is also a part of your personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves the victims of the beliefs they hold.

If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality. Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.

“With some women, not conducting regular self-examinations would rouse as many fears as doing them — and since those women’s beliefs follow official medical ones so strictly, they’re much better off with the examinations. In this and all instances regarding health, each woman should weigh all the evidence, examine her beliefs, and make her own decisions.”

I remind the reader that after break ended at 11:35 in the last session (the 804th in Chapter 1), Seth had this to say: “Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual’s part. It must mirror your own feelings and assessments. Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of various diseases, and filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what seems to be the body’s propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body’s vitality or natural defense system stressed.”

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.