“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane was upset when I got to 330 this noon. Jeff Karder, her doctor, had been in. At first she didn’t want to tell me what he’d said until after lunch, but I persuaded her to tell all. One of the nurses had evidently told Jeff that the open sores on Jane’s right knee were draining. He told Jane that there could be an infection there, at the site of perhaps a bone spur — he wasn’t sure. Jeff added that a small operation might fix it, or that perhaps nothing need be done.

(I’d brought in Chapter 6 of Dreams, which I’d finished typing this morning, and ended up reading the whole thing to Jane except for a couple of notes. I had the time, being caught up on correspondence again. She liked the whole thing. She had the same feeling I’d noticed when reading sessions one hadn’t seen for several years: that it was all brand new, and surprising, as though someone else had produced the work. I told her at the end of the day that the Seth material is an excellent example of her own direct cognition; this obvious description had come to me after I worked with Seth’s material on direct cognition in Chapter 6 of Dreams. A very good point, though, and one I want to add a note on for the chapter.

A suggestion like: “If you go swimming too soon after lunch, you will drown,” is extremely dangerous, for it predicts behavior of a disastrous nature that would follow almost automatically after the first act is performed. Obviously, children who go into the water right after eating do not all drown. The suggestion itself can lead to all kinds of nervous symptoms, however — panics, or stomach cramps — that can persist well into adulthood.

These are all statements leading toward a certain hypothesis. Again, the problem is that often the hypotheses remain unquestioned. You end up with structured beliefs unexamined, that are then automatically acted upon.