“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Their belief systems, therefore, you must admit, are quite practical. Nor are they surrounded by medical professions. Later in the book we will return to the subject. Here, you have, however, what almost amounts to a social program for illness — the flu season. A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved. Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner groceries — all of these elements are involved.

The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least. [They are also told] to pay homage to God. Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life. Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they partially recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma. A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him only in his professional capacity, for he usually does the best he can in the belief system that he shares with his fellows. Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. It has considered man a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his brow.

Many people, caught between such conflicting beliefs, fall prey to physical ills during the Christmas season particularly. The churches and the hospitals are often the largest buildings in any town, and the only ones open on Sunday without recourse to city ordinances. You cannot divorce your private value systems from your health, and the hospitals often profit from the guilt that religions have instilled in their people.

Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality. The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or of any other group, are not thrust upon you, therefore. They are the result of your mass beliefs — isolated in the form of separate disciplines. Medical men, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those specific health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved. The idea of prevention is always based upon fear — for you do not want to prevent something that is joyful. Often, therefore, preventative medicine causes what it hopes to avoid. Not only does the idea [of prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.

At certain times, and most particularly at the birth of medical science in modern times, the belief in inoculation, if not by the populace then by the doctors, did possess the great strength of new suggestion and hope — but I am afraid that scientific medicine has caused as many new diseases as it has cured. When it saves lives, it does so because of the intuitive healing understanding of the physician, or because the patient is so impressed by the great efforts taken in his behalf, and therefore is convinced secondhandedly of his own worth.

The physician is also caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs. Sometimes these conflict, and sometimes they only serve to deepen his feelings that the body, left alone, will get any disease possible.

I’m well aware of current scientific theories about the supposed separate functions of the two hemispheres of the brain: The left half is said to control logical activities like writing, while the right half is responsible for the intuitive artistic abilities. Perhaps — but after all, writing can be intuitively based, and art can be logically produced. At least the whole brain (its hemispheres are connected deep within by the corpus callosum) must contain that necessary basic creative ability that may then be apportioned out — but only to an extent, I think — between the hemispheres. Barring physical injury/surgery, there must be more communication between its halves (via the corpus callosum) than the brain is given credit for. There’s so much we don’t know yet about the brain (let alone the mind!). What about telepathy between the hemispheres? I think the divisions charted for the brain so far may be too strict, that beliefs about such separations may get in the way of our perception of the brain’s beautifully whole operation.