“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least. [They are also told] to pay homage to God. Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life. Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they partially recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma. A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

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.

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 physician is also caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs. Sometimes these conflict, and sometimes they only serve to deepen his feelings that the body, left alone, will get any disease possible.