“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You were presented—or rather you presented yourself—with a prime example of the abilities of the natural person. I said something once to the effect that so-called miracles were simply the result of nature unimpeded, and certainly that is the case. You are presented now, in the world, with a certain picture of a body and its activities, and that picture seems (underlined) very evidential. It seems to speak for itself.

(9:34.) The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming (underlined) exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture. Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality—activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in your society many people never reach that point—or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons….

Your Olympics,² on television, present you with evidence of the great capacity of the young human body. The contrast between the activity of those athletes, however, and the activity of the normal young person is drastic. (Pause.) You believe that the greatest training and discipline must be used to bring about such activity—but that seemingly extraordinary physical ability simply represents the inherent capacities of the human body. In those cases, the athletes through training are finally able to give a glimpse of the body’s spontaneous abilities. The training is necessary because it is believed necessary (all with emphasis).

(9:53.) Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes—that it has a face-saving quality in your society—so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.