“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) In your dream, the tree represents the tree of life, or nature, growing on its own, repairing itself as it goes along. You saw the doctor in working clothes, expressing your feeling that doctors were more like mechanics, dealing with exterior manipulation, thus your doctor appears without his usual well-groomed attire, and fashionable facade. This is tied in of course with your experience in general regarding the members of the medical profession, and here symbolically you strip the doctor of his assumed authority, and see him more like a hired man—a plumber or mechanic, perhaps, but devoid of any deep philosophical bent.

(From my own notes: I got there at 1:05 on a cold and rainy afternoon. I found Jane quite upset as she lay nude on her left side. Dr. Gibson and the head nurse, Mary, had been in to 330 to look at Jane’s knee. “I hear from people that your knee has been bothering you,” the doctor had said. “No,” Jane replied, “it hasn’t.” Dr. G looked at it, remarked that she had a large ulcer on the knee, and quickly left with Mary before Jane was quick enough to ask him what he was talking to the nurse about. Jane immediately feared the worst: that Dr. G was going to want to operate upon, or lance, the knee, or something like that.

(I told Jane she could very well be projecting her own fears upon something that wasn’t that bad at all—that the episode instead served to show what a deep hold old beliefs still had on her. That, as Seth has remarked, the conscious mind must learn to rid itself of fear. She’d projected a lot of negative feelings upon the doctor, whom she likes, even to the point of tears. “And just when I was doing so well last night and today,” she said, as I made ready to turn her on her back.

Ruburt’s reaction to the doctor’s visit this morning does indeed show the hold that old beliefs can have, and the panicky feelings they can arouse.

[...] The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer. The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

(10:10.) Even in primitive societies, witch doctors and other natural therapists have understood that the point of power is in the present, and they have utilized natural hypnosis as a method of helping other individuals to concentrate their own energy. [...] The hypnotist, or witch doctor, or therapist, then immediately inserts the beliefs he thinks the subject needs.

In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, your doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you will become ill.

If the cultural concepts include voodoo or witchcraft, then the therapeutic situation will be seen in that context, and a curse uncovered; which, using the power point of the present, the doctor will then reverse.

Upon the patient a doctor often assigns and projects his own feelings of helplessness against which he combats. The interactions continue with the patient trying to please the doctor, and at best merely changing from one group of symptoms to another. Far too often the doctor shares the patient’s unshakable belief in poor health and disease.

[...] Behind this is the psychic pattern of beliefs in which the patient often assigns to the doctor the powers of knowledge and wisdom that his beliefs have taught him he does not have. Knowing otherwise, the patient still wants to consider the doctor omnipotent.

[...] Here you have again, as in psychoanalysis, a hide-and-seek arrangement in which both doctor and patient take part. [...]

Because they are held in such high esteem, the suggestions given by doctors are paid particular attention. [...]

[...] All the doctors seemed to agree that I had a kind of burned-out case of rheumatoid arthritis, with little active inflammation. But one doctor soberly told me that I’d never walk again, or even put my weight upon my feet again, unless I underwent a series of joint-replacement operations—if, he cautioned, I proved to be a “proper candidate.”

[...] The doctors wanted to literally cut the major joints out of her body! [...] “Oh, they’d operate on the shoulders, too,” a doctor told me in front of Jane, without inflection, as though we were discussing an inanimate mechanism that needed rebuilding. [...]

Let me quickly add that all of the doctors who examined her advanced their suggestions while trying to be helpful, and in the name of “truth” as they saw it—with individual variations, of course. [...] The exception was the youngish doctor Jane had referred to at the very end of her last session. [...]

So last night, less than two days after she’d held her last session, I asked Jane for some material about the central theme of her days in the hospital, both from her own viewpoint and that of the doctors who probed, examined, and discussed her and her problems. [...]

[...] The doctor and the medium mentioned by Ruburt are quite legitimate. [...] No doctor in your plane or mine, can relieve an individual of symptoms if the symptoms are serving a valid purpose to the inner self; or, in relieving particular symptoms, others will arise.

[...] I am not a doctor. [...]

[...] A doctor will try to the best of his ability to relieve the symptoms, and most of them, regardless of their plane of endeavor, are content with this. [...]

[...] A physical doctor would be of no help. [...]

(I was with Doctor Kiley and another man who was also a doctor. Doctor Kiley is also dead, has been for some years, at least seven, and was a brother of Helen McIlwain; she was in my dream of November 8, relating to my mother and Seth’s subsequent statements concerning her death. Now, Doctor Kiley and this other doctor were joking and clowning around, laughing about another doctor in connection with my mother.

[...] Or on the other doctor they spoke of, or both?

[...] I pointed to a spot in the air beside a telephone pole, and spoke about the two men—Kiley and the other doctor—who had “crashed through” a barrier of some kind. [...]

[...] I was talking to doctor about this; I’m not sure if the people were even being told what this was, the idea being to slip the stuff as innocuously as possible. [...] The doctor said OK I wouldn’t have to take it of course. [...]

[...] In the nightmare a doctor said I’d have to get a certain shot or vaccine as preventative medicine though he regretted having to do it. [...]

[...] There is more, involving the doctor and the monkey. [...] The monkey was not free because it had been inoculated with diseased tissue, yet the doctor hoped to keep the disease in control, or leashed, through measured inoculations. Ruburt saw a real doctor and a real monkey because he wanted to bring home the point that living animals were then involved who were then diseased, and that real men conducted the experiments.

[...] No doctor stood in the parking lot with a monkey on a leash, yet in other terms the event was literal, for your doctors feel that they must control the animal in you to heal, and that without their leash the animals would run wild. [...]

(When Wanda called, however, we learned that her doctor wasn’t the kind of specialist Jane should see after all, so the situation was resolved seemingly without effort on our parts. Wanda recommended other doctors. [...] I don’t envision her seeing a doctor at this time, now. [...]

[...] While at the bank yesterday noon I met Wanda, a nurse who worked in the office of a doctor I’d seen some years ago for an ear problem. Since I’d been thinking of Wanda rather strongly last week, wondering whether the doctor in question could help Jane and her eye condition, I took our meeting as a clear case of the workings of Framework 2. On impulse I asked Wanda if she could arrange an appointment for Jane, and was surprised to hear that it could be set up for next Monday. [...]

(Driving home, I had misgivings about my actions in making the appointment without consulting Jane, but told myself I trusted my impulse and the working of Framework 2. I also felt that Jane would never see a doctor on her own. [...] I thought Jane would be able to see the doctor and do her own thing without conflict. [...]

(Note: Strange to say, but at the same time I felt that Jane was more concerned about trying to make it into the doctor’s office—“Humiliating myself before all those people” —than she was about her symptoms themselves.

[...] A true doctor cannot be scientifically objective. [...] Instead, usually, the doctor’s words and very methods literally separate the patient from himself or herself. [...]

(With emphasis:) Now in your framework of beliefs the psychiatrists and the doctors are helpful. [...] 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. [...]

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.

[...] It becomes “a blood sample” to the doctor. [...]

Adequate scientific proofs, such as science so surely needs, requires the enlargement of consciousness; not, my dear doctor, on my part, but on the part of science. [...] Nevertheless the fact remains that I am indeed extending myself, and my dear doctor it is science which is not extending itself, and it is science that will not meet reality halfway.

[...] Objects could be placed upon it; and yet, Doctor Instream, our entranced individual is not conscious of that table. [...]

[...] I use you, dear Doctor Instream, only as an example. [...]

[...] For my dear doctor, without suggestion, without automatic and continuous suggestion, no human being would breathe one breath. [...]

(On July 20, Jane and I received a letter from Dr. Instream, in which he mentioned the possibility of a session with another doctor at Oswego State University College; the other doctor also wanted to consider the study, within limits Seth may feel advisable.

[...] One point first: Doctor Instream is the best man that you could have contacted. [...]

[...] In the nonpsychic arena these correspond with your doctors and nurses and even to, say, social reformers. [...]

[...] It’s as if, at usual levels, you tried to be a doctor instead of a writer. [...]

[...] He is doing much better than the doctor thought that he would, while often refusing to follow the conventional course of action that the good doctor advised. [...]

[...] (In Mass Events, for instance.) If people were not sick they would not need doctors (quietly amused), and since many people are unaware consciously of their own motives, then the doctors and the patients are often in league with each other, helping to maintain the dis-ease. [...]

[...] Jane answered my question about whether Fred had any idea he was giving out rotten suggestions about arthritis by saying that it never occurred to him—or any other doctor. [...]

[...] The doctor who tended her was an old family friend, knew both the father and son, both doctors.)

Seems a doctor was a close friend or had a strong effect on your life.

[...] The doctor who tended her was an old family friend, knew both the father and son, both doctors.) Two brothers. [...]

Seems a doctor was a close friend or had a strong effect on your life. [...]

(There followed a very confusing [and to me upsetting] several hours during which Jane and our neighbor, Leonard Yaudes, tried contacting Miss Callahan’s doctor, her relatives, her friends, our landlady, and a hospital. [...] There were mix-ups, in which Miss Callahan’s doctor was waiting for her at the emergency room at the hospital while Miss Callahan stayed home, and during which time Jane called the relatives several times, pleading with them to help, etc. It finally ended when Jane and Leonard secured the help of another doctor, who arrived by midnight and stated that Miss Callahan should be in the hospital.

[...] It was advertised in the National Enquirer: “A Doctor’s Proven New Home Cure for Arthritis,” by Giraud W. Campbell, Doctor of Osteopathy.Jane began to read through it at once, out of curiosity if nothing else, and discovered that it called for a very rigid diet. [...]

[...] The people involved first of all had been told by doctors—medical doctors—that they themselves had no control over their own disease, that the symptoms could be lessened somewhat—perhaps—but that there was no hope for recovery.

[...] When there are no cures, or patients do not respond, or they slide back into old ways, the doctor-author simply says they are not ready to take the steps necessary, or they have taken them half-heartedly. [...]

(Four specific paintings were discussed between us, and I priced each one with Jane present, so that she could quote prices to the doctor should he call while I was away. [...]

[...] In addition, the painting bought by the doctor is also strongly geometric in design.

[...] I have the habit of dating my paintings, so will be able to check this data when I visit the doctor’s office. [...]

[...] This makes the abstracts available for the doctor’s inspection, and perhaps purchase.

[...] He or she should be enlightened enough through doctor-patient discussions to make choices about the treatment. In some cases, however, patients will make it clear that they prefer to hand over all responsibility for treatment to the doctor, and in such instances their decisions should be followed. It is a good idea for the doctor to question the patient sometimes, to make sure that the decision is not one of the moment alone.