“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE NATURAL BODY AND ITS DEFENSES

When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.

In the first place, the causes are not biological. Biology is simply the carrier of a “deadly intent.” In the second place, there is a difference between a virus produced in the laboratory and that inhabiting the body — a difference recognized by the body but not by your laboratory instruments.

Give us a moment… In a way the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of, say, inoculation. But the body’s chemistry is also confused, for it “knows” it is reacting to a disease that is not “a true disease,” but a biologically counterfeit intrusion.

To that extent — and I do not mean to overstate the case — the body’s biological integrity is contaminated. It may at the same time produce antibodies also, for example, to other “similar” diseases, and so overextend its defenses that the individual later comes down with another disease.

(Emphatically:) Many people who would not get the disease in any case are then religiously inoculated with it. The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.⁴ Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.

(Then a moment later:) Chapter 1: “The Natural Body and Its Defenses.”

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.

(11:44.) I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.

Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.