“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s birthday was yesterday, and a couple of events that made pretty nice presents revolved around that date. Two days ago, she worked on our new front porch for the first time; she sat in the slanting sunlight and wrote down the information she psychically picked up from the “world view” of William James, the American psychologist and philosopher who lived from 1842–1910. She now has considerable material for her book on James. [In the note she’s making for her Introduction to Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche, Jane describes a world view as “…a living psychological picture of an individual life, with its knowledge and experience, which remains responsive and viable long after the physical life itself is over.”]

If, however, you dwell mentally in a generalized environment of fear, the body is given no clear line of action, allowed no appropriate response. Look at it this way: An animal, not necessarily just a wild one in some native forest, but an ordinary dog or cat, reacts in a certain fashion. It is alert to everything in its environment. A cat does not anticipate danger from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what would happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat’s cozy yard.

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 overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a generalized condition of contentment — brought about, however, by multitudinous specific responses. Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual’s part. It must mirror your own feelings and assessments. Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of various diseases, and filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what seems to be the body’s propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body’s vitality or natural defense system stressed.

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.