“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Once again, the elderly were singled out. It seems obvious that they are more susceptible to diseases. That susceptibility is a medical fact of life. It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s biological reality. It is a fact brought about through suggestion. The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.

So the Christmas season carries a man’s hopes in your society, and the flu season mirrors his fears and shows the gulf between the two.

The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him only in his professional capacity, for he usually does the best he can in the belief system that he shares with his fellows. Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. It has considered man a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his brow.

Science has seen man as an accidental product of an uncaring universe, a creature literally without a center of meaning, where consciousness was the result of a physical mechanism that only happened to come into existence, and that had no reality outside of that structure. Science has at least been consistent in that respect. Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.

I am speaking now of religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost. Man is by nature a religious creature.

Dictation: One of man’s strongest attributes is religious feeling. It is the part of psychology most often overlooked. There is a natural religious knowledge with which you are born. Ruburt’s book The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James explains that feeling very well. It is a biological spirituality translated into verbal terms. It says: “Life is a gift (and not a curse). I am a unique, worthy creature in the natural world, which everywhere surrounds me, gives me sustenance, and reminds me of the greater source from which I myself and the world both emerge. My body is delightfully suited to its environment, and comes to me, again, from that unknown source which shows itself through all of the events of the physical world.”

The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths. The individual, however, has a private biological and spiritual integrity that is a part of man’s heritage, and is indeed any creature’s right. Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being — and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.

(Intently:) Disease must be combatted, fought against, assaulted, wiped out. In many ways the body becomes almost like an alien battleground, for many people trust it so little that it becomes highly suspect. Man then seems pitted against nature. Some people think of themselves as patients, as others, for example, might think of themselves as students. Such people are those who are apt to take preventative measures against whatever disease is in fashion or in season, and hence take the brunt of medicine’s unfortunate aspects, when there is no cause.