“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper last night Jane and I had one of our discussions that left us feeling out-of-sorts—half angry and resentful, accusatory and regretful that we hadn’t done better in the past. No need to go into details here, but it ended up with Jane asking me to get the notebook of sinful-self material. By then it was 9:00 PM, but she read a lot of it and said she was picking up some valuable insights.

(She had a very restless night and called me several times. One time, at about 4:00 AM, her legs were very restless, so she got back up in her chair. I was groggy, but asked her to tell me what she meant when she said she’d come up with some good insights from the evening before. What she explained to me in briefer form is related below. I think it’s very good material, and will prove to be very helpful. Her legs, especially the left one, had bothered her considerably, and led to her getting up. I mentioned at the time that maybe she could do some dictation this morning about her new insights, and this session is the result.

(No sooner had we started than Bill Tolbert showed up to start mowing the grass and using his trimmer, which is even noisier than the mower, but Jane persevered after I shut doors and windows, depending on where Bill was working outside. Then Mrs. Austin called about delivering the washing. But all in all this material is good.

(Jane began speaking quite rapidly, but I managed to keep up. Her voice was okay for the most part.)

That position had so many facets that it was hard to follow—that they were hard to follow—and even I had difficulty keeping track of the continuing saga of medical detail. Doctor Kardon had come that afternoon. I told myself I’d react only to constructive suggestions, but I soon felt knocked down by her interpretation of events. No blood test results had really come through yet (from St. Joe’s last week). She had said earlier they would merely give indications that vasculitis might be present or might not be present—they wouldn’t say yes or no.

But in any case she decided that I had it, and since I had already shown some evidence in my body, the next thing was how to treat it. Even discounting for the present the more tricky drugs, drugs with many side effects, quite severe sometimes, there was a drug less dangerous. Its side effect had something to do with preventing the blood from clotting so easily in the capillaries, I think. (Persantine.) The more dangerous ones, for God’s sake, turned down the body’s own defense mechanisms and immunity, an effect that really seemed absolutely senseless to me.

(9:29.) It made good sense enough to take the artificial thyroid that my body obviously was demanding. To introduce an entirely new line of drugs, with known side effects, for a condition that could be quite transitory—if I had it —went against everything that I believed. So Dr. Kardon’s visit was behind Robby’s suggestion that I look at my own sinful-self material, and I intuitively felt that the time was probably right. I browsed through one notebook, is what it amounted to.

(We took a one-minute break at 9:32. Bill was using his trimmer in the front lawn—a very noisy operation.)

Most of that material was written last summer. I could hardly believe it: where the hell had the year gone? Looking back, it seemed like a vacuum.

The material did have impact, though. Though—I could feel it again. I read almost all of it. On the topside the reasons for my position and physical condition seemed so dumb that it was hard to believe they did have that much impetus. They made less sense to Rob, who I felt found them utterly without reason.

One line I’d forgotten put the situation rather clearly, though: I was afraid that Seth’s work and my own might have some fatal flaw to which I was blind, so that I suppose by trusting the inner self and individual inspiration, I might actually also be opening up that horrendous Pandora’s box.

Though I haven’t explored this idea yet at all in depth, I got a feeling that by the time I’d finished Mass Events and my God of Jane I’d come to a point of indecision and perhaps certainly some despondency because I had not resolved the issues. My concentration upon the mail had led me to consider more and more the negative aspects of man’s condition. I think it seemed that I could go no further, that I lacked whatever it was that I needed.

It’s Friday morning now as Rob writes down these notes for me. It was a week ago yesterday that the finger suddenly turned so dark—nearly black —and I realized something else: the condition with the finger had happened as I explained to Peggy Gallagher how Rob and I had trusted our lives to our intuitions in the flood of ‘72. Peggy was going to use some of the material for a newspaper anniversary article. In that case I had trusted myself—not for example taking tetanus shots, though early radio medical advice insisted upon the shots as an emergency procedure.

I don’t mean to be too hard on myself, either. To be told that you might have a brain tumor, or multiple sclerosis one week, as I was in my early days at the hospital, then be told that I would most probably never be able to put my weight on my feet again without a possible series of long operations. To be told my hearing might possibly be gone for good, or that I might need an instant operation to avoid losing a finger, to be told that it was certainly possible I could lose fingers and toes—all of those suggestions and ideas, with their implications, were hard to take, and in many ways I handled them well.

Now that I took one drug, however, or rather thyroid extract, I was to some degree connected to that structure, but because I was, this did not mean I had to fall for the rest of it. I’m sure there is more coming to me intuitively, and I hope emotionally, that will give my life the impetus that I need.

(“Dr. K. visited at 1:30 PM. Explained the dangers of vasculitis to Jane—possible damage to internal organs—start treatment before that happens, if necessary. Jane’s finger looked better. [No results in yet of blood tests taken a week ago at St. Joe’s. Tests sent to Rochester.] Jane got more and more depressed and scared as Dr. K. talked, I could see it, in spite of suggestions we’d agreed on before her visit. Toes look okay. It seems that we may have to just get away from doctors and their suggestions as much as possible. Dr. K. wants Dr. Sobel from Ithaca to examine Jane Friday even if blood tests aren’t in yet: “I can give him the results over the phone later.” I wanted to postpone visit to emergency room “till test results were in,” but Dr. S. won’t be at St. Joe’s next week. Peggy Jowett came as Dr. K. left. I helped her put Jane on the waterbed. Jane had cried a bit after Dr. K. left and before Peggy came in, and I’d tried to console her. Now Jane burst into tears on the waterbed: “I wish we’d tried harder with our own suggestions and ideas....” Crying didn’t last. Dr. K. said Jane could take a couple of aspirin if necessary in the middle of the night. I told Jane we could still use our own ideas. I also wondered—but didn’t say so—why those ideas had allowed the whole question of something like vasculitis to develop to begin with—or, for that matter, the “arthritis.” Jane also cried on the waterbed that now “it would be harder to do anything on our own, because we had to deal with the medical establishment too,” as well as our own beliefs. Dr. K. told us Jane wouldn’t feel any results from the 100 mcg Synthroid tablets she started on last Monday for a long time—that the effects from the increased dosage were “weeks away.” I wondered if this was a contradiction, because on the phone last month, Dr. K. had said Jane’s thyroid function was almost up to par from the medication she had been taking, meaning that it had acted quicker than “weeks away.”....)