“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:03.) You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you — not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage. The majority of accepted beliefs — religious, scientific, and cultural — have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom — a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God. Life is seen as “a valley of tears” — almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.

Your beliefs have generated feelings of unworth. Having artificially separated yourselves from nature, you do not trust it, but often experience it as an adversary. Your religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species. Your bodies then were relegated to nature and your souls to God, who stood immaculately apart from His creations.

Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say: “Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such a disease.”

More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements. Different reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the list. Period. Generations before you managed to subsist on many such foods, and they were in fact promoted as additive to health. Indeed, man almost seems to be allergic to his own natural environment, a prey to the weather itself.

It is true that your food contains chemicals it did not in years past. Yet within reason man is biologically capable of assimilating such materials, and using them to his advantage.

Those programs often portray your cultural world in exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence. Yet your more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose. The individual must feel that his actions count. He is driven to violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is that last resort.

If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality. Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.

Seth gave an excellent session for us on that last warm night in Marathon. He did his best to reassure us. The following excerpt leads up to the quotation that inspired this note:

I’ll conclude this note by making three quick points. The first is that other agencies and individuals in the medical and psychological fields are conducting studies of the ties that exist between emotional states and cancer. The second is that Jane and I are perfectly aware of all the good things that medical science has contributed to our worldwide civilization; given our species’ present collective beliefs about the vulnerability of the individual to outside forces, medicine as it’s now practiced is a vital component of that civilization. The third point is that with his views, Seth is simply trying to open our eyes to a much wider understanding of human capacities.

Apropos of that final item, Jane and I refer the reader to the entire last session. For in it Seth not only discussed the body’s natural defenses and how it “immunizes itself,” but also examined our negative cultural beliefs about the body and disease. We think his material is so good that it deserves more than one reading.