“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: (Pause, one of many.) Now: To a certain extent (underlined), epidemics are the result of a mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved. Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.

There are also even deeper biological connections with the heart of nature. You are biological creatures. Your proud human consciousness rests on the vast “unconscious” integrity of your physical being. In that regard your consciousness is as natural as your toe. In terms of the species’ integrity your mental states are, then, highly important. Despair or apathy is a biological “enemy.” Social conditions, political states, economic policies, and even religious or philosophical frameworks that foster such mental states, bring about a biological retaliation. They act like fire applied to a plant.

The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.

The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.

Civilizations are literally social species. They die when they see no reason to live, yet they seed other civilizations. Your private mental states en masse bring about the mass cultural stance of your civilization. To some extent, then, the survival of your civilization is quite literally dependent upon the condition of each individual; and that condition is initially a spiritual, psychic state that gives birth to the physical organism. That organism is intimately connected to the natural biological state of each other person, and to each other living thing, or entity, however minute.

This book will be devoted, then, to those conditions that best promote spiritual, psychic, and physical zest, the biological and psychic components that make a species desire to continue its kind. Such aspects promote the cooperation of all kinds of life on all levels with one another. No species competes with another, but cooperates to form an environment in which all kinds can creatively exist.

There are also “trial runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.

(Pause at 11:55.) Suffering is not necessarily good for the soul at all, and left alone natural creatures do not seek it. There is a natural compassion, a biological knowledge, so that the mother of an animal knows whether or not existing conditions will support the new offspring. Animals instinctively realize their relationship with the great forces of life. They will instinctively starve an offspring while its consciousness is still unfocused, rather than send it loose under adverse conditions.

Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masse is vastly lacking. Their relationships with their own species is no longer in balance. They cannot use their full abilities or powers, nor are many of them given compensating elements in terms of a beneficial psychic relationship with man — but instead are shunted aside, unwanted and unloved. An unloved animal does not want to live.

Love involves self-respect, the trust in individual biological zest and integrity. To that extent, in their way animal epidemics have the same causes as human ones.