“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) In all of these areas the problem, whatever its nature or cause, is in one way or another “magically” transferred to another facet of activity, projected away from the self. Huge energy blocks are moved. The man who has believed that he was evil may now see the world, or persons of another faith or political affiliation, as evil instead. He then feels rid of the problem itself but is quite ready to attack it in others, and with great self-righteousness and justification.

You will often try to project a problem outward to free yourself. If this is done the question at issue will seem forever outside of you, beyond solution, and of mass proportion. Let us look into a situation involving a woman I will call Dineen, who telephoned Ruburt today from a Western state, and see one of the predicaments that can arise.

She had been going from psychic to psychic, dabbling in automatic writing and seeing little of her husband, who was involved in his own business affairs. She had been told by different “psychics” that she would be a psychic teacher, and various words and techniques had been given her to ward off the “evil” influence.

(10:29.) If you believe that you come down with a cold every time you are in a draft, you are using natural hypnosis. If you think that you must come and go at everyone else’s beck and call, then you are like Dineen, who believes that she must do what this “hypnotist” tells her to do. In her case Dineen gave up the responsibility for action and initiative, yet because one must act the reasons were assigned to another. Ruburt also pointed this out. Dineen asked for advice from me and again Ruburt said, quite correctly, “You must learn to stop depending upon others, to use your own common sense. You must stop trying to use one symbol against another, and look at your own life and your beliefs.”

As I have said before, your thoughts are reality. They directly affect your body. It seems that you are highly civilized people because you put your ill into hospitals where they can be cared for. What you do, of course, is to isolate a group of people who are filled with negative beliefs about illness. The contagion of beliefs spreads. Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill. The sick and their doctors both work on that principle.

This isolation would be unfortunate enough without the application of drugs meant to help, but often given without understanding. Loved ones are permitted to visit the sick on but certain occasions, so those who wish them well in the strongest terms, who are closest to them and who love them, are efficiently prevented from exerting any natural constructive behavior.

The individual is made to feel powerless, at the mercy of doctors or nurses who often do not have the time or energy to be personable, or to explain his [or her] condition in terms that he can understand. The patient is therefore forced to transfer his own sense of power to others, which further deepens his misery; this in turn reinforces the sense of powerlessness that initiated his condition.

Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him. The stability of familiarity is withdrawn. Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions. I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur — but they do so despite the system and not because of it. In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself. The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery. But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.

(Pause.) In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood. There is little emotional involvement. (Long pause.) The senile, in their efforts to run away from their closeted rooms in sanitariums, often show far greater sanity in their way than the relative or society who imprisoned them. For they intuitively recognize the need to be free, and they sense the lack of the mystic communion with the earth that has been denied them. (See the 650th session in Chapter Thirteen.)

When and if it is killed by its brothers, this is not an act of cruelty but an innate understanding that the creature can no longer operate physically without agony; a quite natural euthanasia is involved, in which the “patient” also acquiesces. In your society such a natural death is most difficult, and because of the power structures can hardly be promoted. No one who decides upon death is saved from it by the medical profession, however. On deeper levels the quite normal desire for survival requires that the individual leave his or her body, in your terms, at one time or another. When that period arrives the person knows it, and the great vitality of the spirit no longer wants to be encased by a suffering physical body.