“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I called Upjohn nursing service last Tuesday, noting that starting next Monday we’ll want a nurse at the house only three times a week instead of five. I’ll do the dressing-changes required for Jane’s decubiti the other days. The nurse, Peggy Jowett, has already been informed of the change in routine. Our idea is to soon cut down the visits to two a week, then one....

(One thing that led to our decision to cut down the visits was that I felt that often Jane seemed worse after the nurses left than she was before they arrived, although her being stirred up for a couple of hours may have contributed to my feeling. But it does seem like a mixed blessing at best. We’re always on the watch for negative suggestions, and some of the nurses dispense these very freely. One of them, Eleanor, visited Jane the last two Mondays and Tuesdays. She is now on vacation, and we trust that the reduced schedule will do away with Eleanor’s visits. She is a nice person who means well, but who also broadcasts negative suggestions like a radio beacon, quite unwittingly. It’s easy to see that she has built her life around such feelings, and is quite pleased with it. [She told Jane she’s had five operations herself.] Jane got so that when Eleanor was here she was constantly saying “no, no, no” to herself as the nurse talked, in order to protect herself from that steady barrage.

(Jane answered by telling me how she felt this morning—“discombobulated” —meaning that various parts of her body seem to move, or want to move, out of rhythm or sync with other parts—but that overall she recognizes that those are all healthy signs of the body trying to heal itself. She then said that more and more it was going to be up to us to pull ourselves out of our difficulties, since it seemed we’d get little help from others. She wants us to be as optimistic as we can. These ideas are a great improvement over her earlier attitudes, of course, and we’ll see what we can do. They also probably answer some of my questions about the role her sinful self may be playing these days.

I will give you more on the sinful self (long pause), and I myself like to have our material smoothly flowing in your directions, so that the sinful self material will naturally come when it is most naturally meant and needed.

(As Seth remarked, the session is an excellent one. and we must try to put it into practice. I think that many of his suggestions are automatically falling into place in our lives, too, and that our “crash course in medicine” has served as an invaluable trigger and impetus in that regard. How ironic it may turn out to be—that a course we avoided for many years—the medical one—may turn out to be the final push we needed in order to put our beliefs in order.)