“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Suppose a scientist found a first orange, and used every instrument available to examine it, but refused to feel it, taste it, smell it, or otherwise to become personally involved with it for fear of losing scientific objectivity.

Because of your attitudes, ideas do not seem as real to you as objects, or as practical. Thoughts are not given the same validity as rocks or trees or beer cans (two of which sat on the coffee table between us at the moment) or automobiles. In your terms an automobile gets you somewhere. You do not understand the great mobility of thought, nor grasp its practical nature. You make your world, and in an important manner your thoughts are indeed the immediate personal blueprints for it. When you manipulate objects you feel efficient. The manipulation of thoughts is far more practical. Here is a brief example.

(10:36.) Your medical technology may help you “conquer” one disease after another — some in fact caused by that same technology — and you will feel very efficient as you do heart transplants, as you fight one virus after another. But all of this will do nothing except to allow people to die, perhaps, of other diseases still “unconquered.” People will die when they are ready to, following inner dictates and dynamics. A person ready to die will, despite any medication. (Emphatically:) A person who wants to live will seize upon the tiniest hope, and respond. The dynamics of health have nothing to do with inoculations. They reside in the consciousness of each being. In your terms they are regulated by emotions, desires, and thoughts. A true doctor cannot be scientifically objective. He cannot divorce himself from the reality of his patient. Instead, usually, the doctor’s words and very methods literally separate the patient from himself or herself. The malady is seen almost as a thing apart from the patient’s person — but thrust upon it — over which the patient has little control.³

Give us a moment … The complete physician would be a person who learned to understand the dynamics of being, the soul-body relationship — one who was healthy in his or her own body. Unhappy people cannot teach you to be happy. Sick ones cannot teach you to be well. Psychiatrists have a high suicide rate. Why do you think they can help you live happily, or add to your vitality? Physicians are not the healthiest of men by far.⁴ Why do you think they can cure you?

(With emphasis:) Now in your framework of beliefs the psychiatrists and the doctors are helpful. They know more than you do about the techniques upon which you all agree. While the society accepts these techniques, then you are to some extent dependent upon them, and you had better think twice before you let them go. But in greater, more vital issues, the sick doctor does not know as much about health as an “uneducated, untrained,” but healthy person — and I am speaking in quite practical terms. The person who is healthy understands the dynamics of health. In your framework it seems that his or her understanding can be of little practical value to you if you are, for instance, unhealthy. But a true medical profession would be, literally, a health profession. It would seek out people who were healthy and learn from them how to promote health, and not how to diagram disease.

(Once again now, Jane wondered why the “more elaborate or complicated qualities” of her trances [she couldn’t really explain what she meant here] were necessary in order for her to deliver this book, as opposed to the “easier” ones she’d experienced for Personal Reality. I suggested she forget such comparisons and think that “Unknown” Reality simply required a different approach, for whatever subjective reasons, and that perhaps her constant questioning would be taken care of as her work on it progressed.⁵

3. See the 661st session in Chapter 17 of Personal Reality. In his material after 11:23 especially, Seth discusses the doctor-patient relationship, and the feelings of powerlessness that can beset the individual during times of illness.

4. Current statistics show that in the United States the suicide rate for psychiatrists, doctors, and dentists is three to four times higher than it is for the rest of the population. There’s much discussion now of the additional stresses and frustrations encountered by those in the medical disciplines, aside from personality traits or conflicts that can lead an individual to take his or her own life; the suicide of a doctor, for instance, may be triggered by his inability to fulfill the role society expects of him.

The bulk of the material in Personal Reality concerns the nature of beliefs, and the physical and mental environments that are created, both individually and en masse, as a result of those beliefs. It follows, then, that a number of the sessions in that book either deal with health and illness, or with subjects that approach those topics in various ways. Chapters 16 and 17 in particular contain material on what Seth calls natural hypnosis, and on Western medicine, physicians, the suggestions associated with medical insurance and “health” literature, diet, childbirth, hospitals, natural death, good and evil, and so forth.