“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE EVENTS OF “NATURE.”
EPIDEMICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

(One might say that Mass Events had its origins two Seth books ago — way back in Volume I of “Unknown” Reality, which Seth finished dictating in June 1974. At 10:14 in the 697th session for that work, he made this statement: “I will have more to say concerning illnesses, epidemics, and mass disorders in this book.”

The question of epidemics, for example, cannot be answered from a biological standpoint alone. It involves great sweeping psychological attitudes on the part of many, and meets the needs and desires of those involved — needs which, in your terms, arise in a framework of religious, psychological and cultural realities that cannot be isolated from biological results.

I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual was to be stressed, and his power to form his private events. Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

An epidemic, for example, serves the purposes of each individual who is involved, while it also serves its own functions in the greater species framework.

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.

The shortsightedness of such procedures is generally overlooked because of the definite short-term advantages. As a rule, for example, people inoculated against polio do not develop that disease. Using such procedures, tuberculosis has been largely conquered. There are great insidious variables operating, however, and these are caused precisely by the small framework in which such mass epidemics are considered.

(Immediately:) And you can say that your question about epidemics served as a convenient stimulus; for that question, coming from you, comes also from the readers of our books.

(10:39.) We have begun Part 1, to be called: “The Events of ‘Nature.’ Epidemics and Natural Disasters.”

To some degree, epidemics and recognized illnesses serve the sociological purpose of providing an acceptable reason for death — a face-saving device for those who have already decided to die. This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in your terms: But such decisions are often semiconscious (intently). It might be that those individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes — but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.

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.

An automobile accident, suicide, or another kind of accident might result. The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost. I am not here condoning suicide, for too often in your society it is the unfortunate result of conflicting beliefs — and yet it is true to say that all deaths are suicide, and all births deliberate on the part of child and parent. To that extent, you cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.