“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: I am not implying that all social workers are driven by personal problems. On the other hand, it is quite true to say that many such questions turn into challenges with a change of mind, and are then used as impetuses to affect social alterations.

Since the source is not understood, no exterior manipulation in the social structure will be effective enough, and the person involved will see the problem personified in every issue. Hence, even improvements in the social framework will be “invisible” to the individual’s perception — not noticed. They will seem so minute in comparison with the problem.

The same sort of reaction occurs if you concentrate upon a personal illness, and then find any improvements insignificant because of the great focus of your attention upon the negative aspects.

(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.

This is an abdication of the severest kind, involving both your spirituality and your biological nature; you feel trapped far more than an animal in a dire situation, and you deny yourself the ability to act. The withheld power is itself transferred, then. In Dineen’s case it was put onto another. If she could not make decisions this other person could, through long-distance hypnosis, force her to act whether she wanted to or not.

Now her life, while difficult, has its own excitement. She is a heroine, battling cosmic forces of good and evil, important enough so that another person even wants to control her. Even the animals seek stimuli and feel a zest for existence; so in this way Dineen, in a misguided manner, is still giving expression to a definite need of her being.

Each individual has what I will call a psychic territory of power. This represents an inviolate area in which the person insists upon remaining supreme, aware of his or her uniqueness and abilities. This psychic region will be protected at all costs, and here there is indeed immunity from all disease or lack. Other portions of the psyche may be battlegrounds for problems, but the individual will not really feel threatened in a critical way as long as this primary territory is intact.

For all her talk of desperation, then, Dineen has chosen her field of conflict. She will avoid any kind of disfiguration or severe health problem, which to her would be a far greater danger. Because of different personal characteristics, another individual will hold qualities of the mind, say, inviolate, and work out challenges through bodily illness. Another may choose the severest poverty, projecting into that situation his or her own resolved conflicts. Another may choose alcoholism.

In these cases there can be some feeling of panic if an analyst, or friend, tries to switch the areas of conflict. For instance, the alcoholic is well acquainted with the battleground he or she has picked. An ill person, suddenly well, has to face dilemmas that were ignored before, or personified in disease.

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.

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.