“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For many centuries (pause) the structure of the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your shoulders, wondering at man’s distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted (with amused emphasis). It is as laboriously conceived and interwound with “nonsense.” It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

Now: Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself. A man might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his father.

There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures you accept the conditions of life. You create from those conditions the experiences of your days. You are born into belief systems as you are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous fashions (all intently). The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief. I hope to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind, and your fears for yourselves and for mankind.

I do not want any of this to appear too simplistic, but we must begin somewhere in this kind of discussion…. This is far from the entire story [of illness], but it is enough for this evening’s saga. When you can, encourage your fine wife to follow your example in determining not to worry. It should be the first commandment.