“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“The same applies of course to any animal or plant considered extinct. Only an objectively tuned consciousness like man’s would imagine that the physical eradication of a species destroyed its existence.”

(Pause.) Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.

As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladonna can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.³

(9:38.) Give us a moment… The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.

I told you (in the private 836th session) that viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work: People in your time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when those societies encountered “civilized views.”

You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.

I surely understand that you want to make the knowledge practical in the physical world, and to help people as much as you can, but that cannot be the only goal — for that goal must always be the high personal exploration of consciousness, the creative and artistic pursuit for which there may be no name. You do not make shoes to put on people’s feet. You do not make deodorants to stop perspiration. If you did either of these things, you could see material results — material results — at once: people with shoes of your making, and people who did not sweat (with some humor). (In parentheses: Such deodorants are highly disadvantageous, incidentally.)

2. In the 837th session Seth dealt mostly with Billy’s death. It wasn’t that the loss of “just a cat” was the only thing involved in our deep upsets (although Billy’s death came first in our reactions); we also felt a host of emotional and intellectual ramifications arising from that event. We still couldn’t believe Billy was gone for good. This effect was heightened because we had no body to “prove” his death to us. I hadn’t gone after him: The ground was frozen so I couldn’t bury him in the back yard beside Willy, and the veterinarian had agreed to dispose of the remains for us.

From Session 837 for February 28, held on the evening of the day Billy died: “My dear friends: Existence is larger than life or death. Life and death are both states of existence. An identity exists whether it is in the state of life or in the state of death. Your cat’s consciousness never was dependent upon its physical form. Instead, the consciousness was itself choosing the experience of cathood. There was nothing that said: ‘This consciousness must be a cat.’

“The units of consciousness that organized to form his identity as you knew it, still form that pattern — but not physically. The cat exists as itself in the greater living memory of its own ‘larger’ selfhood. Its organization — the cat’s — exists inviolately, but as a part of the greater psychic organization from which it came.

“That identity of Billy’s remains vital, known to itself whether or not it is reactivated in your terms. This is not necessarily always the case — and there is great variation — but Billy identified with ‘the larger organization’ of the litter [that is, with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are also dead], and the consciousnesses of that litter are now together. They are forming a gestalt, where the five consciousnesses will merge to form a new identity.”