“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your terms, the imagination of the animals is limited. Theirs is not merely confined to the elements of previous experience, however. They can imagine events that have never happened to them. Man’s abilities in this respect are far more complicated, for in his imagination he deals with probabilities. In any given period of time, with one physical body, he can anticipate or perform an infinitely vaster number of events — each one remaining probable until he activates it.

(Pause at 11:56.) The illnesses generally attributed to all different ages are involved. Those of the elderly, again, fit in with your social and cultural beliefs, the structure of your family life. Old animals have their own dignity, and so should old men and women. Senility is a mental and physical epidemic — a needless one. You “catch” it because when you are young you believe that old people cannot perform. There are no inoculations against beliefs, so when young people with such beliefs grow old they become “victims.”²

Now, there’s very recent discussion in medical circles that many cases of senility are caused by a “slow virus infection,” rather than just heredity or the traditional aging and oxygen starvation of the brain. The hope, and the unproven speculation, are that eventually such an infection might be treatable medically. But either way (whether senility arises through aging or infection), beliefs would come first, helping the whole body maintain its healthy performance well into old age, or encouraging it to deteriorate unnecessarily.