“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Man’s physical world, with all of its civilizations and cultural aspects, and even with its technologies and sciences, basically represents the species’ innate drive to communicate, to move outward, to create, and to objectify sensed inner realities. The most private life imaginable is a very social affair. The most secluded recluse must still depend upon the biological sociability of not only his own body cells, but of the natural world with all of its creatures. The body, then, no matter how private, is also a public, social, biological statement. A spoken sentence has a certain structure in any language. It presupposes a mouth and a tongue, the kind of physical organization necessary; a mind; a certain kind of world in which sounds have meaning; and a very precise, quite practical knowledge of the nature of sounds, the combination of their patterns, the use of repetition, and a knowledge of the nervous system. Few of my readers possess such conscious knowledge, yet the majority speak quite well.

The person might feel indisposed, but in such ways the body assimilates and uses properties that would otherwise be called alien ones. It immunizes itself through such methods. The body, however, exists with the mind to contend with — and the mind produces an inner environment of concepts. The cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world. They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a nonbiological nature. So they depend upon your assessment.

The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.

The body’s main purpose is not only to survive but to maintain a quality of existence at certain levels, and that quality itself promotes health and fulfillment. A definite, biologically pertinent fear alerts the body, and allows it to react completely and naturally. You might be reading a newspaper headline, for example, as you cross a busy street. Long before you are consciously aware of the circumstances, your body might leap out of the path of an approaching car. The body is doing what it is supposed to do. Though consciously you were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that was acted upon.

The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. It therefore reacts to a pseudothreatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body’s responses must be specific.

The beliefs people acquire when young can be changed, of course, and according to Seth (and the ideas Jane and I have also) this process of change would be the best “inoculation” there is against senility. As I watched my father grow older, with an accompanying progressive loss of memory and function, I used to wonder why he didn’t consciously revise his response to life — and why I never saw any indication that he wanted to. I clearly sensed that it was possible for him to improve his beliefs about life, and that the benefits from such a course of action would be great. Nor did I merely wish he would change just so that I could avoid the pain I felt watching him deteriorate. My father’s chosen withdrawal from the world was all too plain for everyone to see. In our imperfect understanding, Jane and I and other family members saw this process go on: We did not feel there was much any of us could do.