“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The “blue” middle finger on Jane’s left hand was better, and has been slowly improving a bit each day, yet the visit to see Dr. Sobel was a disaster as far as Jane was concerned. Even now she still feels its aftereffects, five days later—much more so than I’d anticipated she would.

(While we were there Dr. S. repeated several times that he wasn’t a vascular surgeon himself. He called a colleague of his who was in Ithaca, and described Jane’s finger condition to him, but if memory serves he received ambiguous information again. Again, I thought the visit at least preserved the status quo for us, since I could see that more and more Jane was turning against the idea of preventative drug treatment for vasculitis, say, or anything else. She was convinced the finger would mend itself, and it appeared to be doing so in its own way. There are more normally-colored patches on it now intermingled with darker spots.

(I also knew she hadn’t wanted to keep the appointment, and that she blamed me at least partly for her keeping it. At the same time she said she wanted to talk to an “expert” on arthritis. I felt caught between these opposing ideas, and didn’t really know what to do. I figured there were reasons for the finger thing erupting so suddenly to begin with, and leading us against our conscious wills into the whole hospital scene at St. Joe’s, so whatever lessons there are in those experiences are still being assimilated. It wasn’t until we returned home Friday afternoon that I began to see how upset Jane had become by thoughts of arthritis, vasculitis, angiograms, clots, drugs, operations, etc. I kept thinking that she was on her way to adopting a stance in which she would turn against medical help and/or advice if at all possible.

(After tonight’s session, and echoing my own ideas of how adamant Jane was becoming about the medical scene, I said that it would be ironic indeed if her encounters with the medical establishment furnished the final great impetus she needed to divest herself of the symptoms and inflate recovery; anything to get away from the massively negative pronouncement of the doctors, to dump old ideas, to set the body free to heal itself.

He went finally because he thought you wanted him to. He feared that his own strong disinclination was simply the result of negative conditioning, and because he was interested in the doctor’s opinions, since this would be the first specialist in that field of arthritis—that he would have a chance to talk to, with all tests completed, and so forth.

He told you he thought you both needed help in getting him into the car, which would necessitate motions quite difficult for him at that point in time—but he went along with your opinion, feeling again that negative suggestion alone was responsible for his own feelings. The body simply knew it did not need that extra stress in a time of stress. What was not said was as important as what was said as far as the interview itself was concerned, for implied there was always the authoritative picture of the progress of certain symptoms, ending in the most dire pictures.

Now much good came out of the entire experience, and from your joint reactions. The sharpness of the encounter made Ruburt come to the decision then and there that he would not use drugs to combat ahead of time conditions that may or may not appear at some future time. More than that, the interview —friendly enough, good humored enough, as it seemed on the surface, made Ruburt realize in an immediate practical fashion the limitations of medical science. He had to take a stand somewhere, but before did not know where to do it, or how.