“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I have said before, your thoughts are reality. They directly affect your body. It seems that you are highly civilized people because you put your ill into hospitals where they can be cared for. What you do, of course, is to isolate a group of people who are filled with negative beliefs about illness. The contagion of beliefs spreads. Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill. The sick and their doctors both work on that principle.

Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him. The stability of familiarity is withdrawn. Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions. I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur — but they do so despite the system and not because of it. In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself. The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery. But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.

(Pause.) In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood. There is little emotional involvement. (Long pause.) The senile, in their efforts to run away from their closeted rooms in sanitariums, often show far greater sanity in their way than the relative or society who imprisoned them. For they intuitively recognize the need to be free, and they sense the lack of the mystic communion with the earth that has been denied them. (See the 650th session in Chapter Thirteen.)

Small hospitals on spacious grounds, with freedom for all but the bedridden to use their bodies, would far surpass what you have. But in your system as it is set up, such an environment is impossible except for the most wealthy.

Certain kinds of medications can indeed help, but those given in your hospitals simply drug the consciousness out of its own understanding, and inhibit the body mechanisms that make for an easy transition. In your prisons you do the same thing, of course, isolating groups of people with like beliefs — denying them all natural stimuli so that a greater contagion of similar beliefs ensues. You separate such people from the normal contact of their loved ones, and all usual conditions for growth or development.