“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.

Your beliefs tell you, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism—a most amazing machine, but a machine (louder), without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion. Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive—or rather, a will-less instinct to survive. To that extent it does admit (underlined) that the machine of the body “intends” to insure its own survival—but a survival which has no meaning beyond itself. And because [the body] is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage.

In that picture consciousness has little part to play. In man’s very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the “awakening,” as described in our book, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time—and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.¹ No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing. Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong. For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world. They were needed. They taught the other generations.

(To me:) You spoke today, or this evening, about some [world] statesmen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve (pause), but who open new horizons in their later years. They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world’s needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not.

(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….

Man’s will to survive includes a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling for the quality (underlined) of life. You are indeed presented with an evidential picture that seems to suggest most vividly the “fact” of man’s steady deterioration, and yet you are also presented with evidence to the contrary, even in your world, if you look for it.

(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.