“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Including the 806th session, those two blocks of material mean that in the last 20 weeks [or 4½ months], Seth has held but one session for Mass Events, and 28 on other subjects. “Maybe he’s already finished the book, and forgot to tell us,” I joked with Jane. “Maybe it’s going to be his shortest one yet.”

(This flexibility also generates some challenges, however, for the great amount of material we’ve accumulated during the Mass Events hiatus gave us the urge to see what we could do about getting at least some of it published, so that others could benefit. The problem — the challenge — would be to find the physical time to do the necessary editing and notes to put such a manuscript in shape for publication; this would be a job that could easily take a year. Jane and I considered combining that hypothetical book with Mass Events, but figured out that the resulting volume would almost surely be too long; longer even than Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, which in our opinion is bulky enough.

(The two sets of material are also different in certain subtle ways, although one can always justifiably say that each subject Seth discusses is in some fashion a part of his overall philosophy. It would have to be that way, of course. In other words, it’s somewhat ironic that during the break in dictating Mass Events Seth-Jane actually produced the equivalent of another book, but one that we can’t do much about, at least at this time.¹

(Now for the “one exception” I referred to at the beginning of this note. It’s the 812th session for October 1, and at least some of it is book dictation. It was triggered by a visit we had recently from a reader who obviously had strong tendencies toward paranoia. Seth gave a session on paranoia in response to that encounter [but not for the individual concerned, although Jane later wrote to him], then instructed us to lay the session aside for inclusion in a later chapter of Mass Events.

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 inoculations themselves do little good overall, and they can be potentially dangerous, particularly when they are given to prevent an epidemic which has not in fact occurred. They may have specific value, but overall they are detrimental, confusing bodily mechanisms and setting off other biological reactions that might not show up, say, for some time.⁵

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.

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.

As I sorted through the mass of material Seth-Jane has produced these last weeks, I found myself once again charmed and mystified by the challenges contained in the art of writing. The painted image can be taken in at a glance, at any stage of its development, but the cognition of the written word takes much more time, no matter how fast one reads or absorbs new material. With a single look the artist has an immediate grasp of the entire work before him; he (or she) can tell what he’s done and has to do, what he may have to change or “fix up,” even if he fails at it. Not so the writer, who while reading must pass up the artist’s simultaneous perception for his own linear cognition as he makes a multitude of decisions involving sentence structure, what to use or eliminate, and so forth.

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.

“But Seth apparently just delivers his material verbally, and that’s it,” Jane wrote after reading my first draft of this note. “Even in a long book, he doesn’t go through any of those cognitive processes Rob mentions. I do when I’m writing, editing, or rewriting my own work. If I do any of that work as Seth, it’s so unconscious and fast that I’m not aware of it. And Seth’s ‘writing’ needs hardly any changes.”

3. I should also note that Seth has made one short, rather mysterious reference to the existence of Frameworks 3 and 4. Two days after he’d first talked about his concept of Frameworks 1 and 2, he came through with the following statement in another private session. Jane and I have yet to ask him to elaborate upon it: “There is, incidentally, a Framework 3 and a Framework 4, in the terms of our discussion — but all such labels are, again, only for the sake of explanation. The realities are merged.”

4. Seth referred to the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome, which struck a tiny proportion of those receiving shots in the 1976 swine flu program in this country. For many reasons, the federal government suddenly ended the very expensive and controversial program last December. Then in May of this year a number of scientists, working both in and outside of government, agreed that the flu shots triggered the Guillain-Barre syndrome, but that the reasons for such reactions in certain individuals are unknown. Jane and I didn’t take the shots.