“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause at 10:20.) While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate areas of private and mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for effective solutions. “You get what you concentrate upon.”¹ Your mental images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but you must understand the ways in which your mass communication systems amplify both the “positive and the negative” issues.

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.

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.

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).

“Your set of problems are of the most creative kind. They are challenges from which great potentials can emerge. Your full energy for work and your creative drives are released, and will be, as you creatively use and understand your problems. But do not concentrate upon them, nor let them close your eyes to the joys and freedoms that you have. You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule (my emphasis).”

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.

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.”

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.