“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Even though Seth didn’t call last Monday’s 867th session book dictation, then, Jane and I presented it because his material on viruses, disease, health, and biological experimentation obviously complemented his themes for Mass Events. The excerpts from tonight’s session continue that presentation.

(9:28.) A small note — for this will be a brief session — to add to your material on disease: All biological organisms know that physical life depends upon a constant transformation of consciousness and form. In your terms I am saying, of course, that physically death gives life. This biological knowledge is intimately acknowledged at microscopic levels. Even your c-e-l-l-s (spelled) know that their deaths are necessary for the continuation of your physical form.

The entire orientation is strange or alien only to your conscious belief systems. In one way or another, most people are aware of a desire for death before they die — a desire they usually do not consciously acknowledge. To a large measure, the sensations of pain are also the results of your beliefs, so that even diseases that are indeed accompanied, now, by great pain, need not be. Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, any more than a cat does when it devours a mouse. The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events are also the results of beliefs. In the greater sphere of spiritual and biological activity, the viruses are protecting life at their level, and in the capacity given them.

(9:40.) Give us a moment… The phase of death is, then, a part of life’s cycle. I mentioned evolutionary experiments,² as you think of evolution. There is a disease you read about recently, where the skin turns leathery after intense itching — a fascinating development in which the human body tries to form a leathery-like skin that would, if the experiment continued, be flexible enough for, say, sweat pores and normal locomotion, yet tough enough to protect itself in jungle environments from the bites of many “still more dangerous” insects and snakes.³ Many such experiments appear in certain stages as diseases, since the conditions are obviously not normal physical ones. To some extent (underlined twice), cancer also represents a kind of evolutionary experiment. But all such instances escape you because you think of so-called evolution as finished.

(Pause.) Some (underlined) varieties of your own species were considered by the animals as diseased animal species, so I want to broaden your concepts there. In the entire natural scheme, and at all levels — even social or economic ones — disease always has its own creative basis. Abnormalities of any kind in birth always represent probable versions of the species itself — and they are kept in the gene pool to provide a never-ending bank of alternates.

(9:56 P.M. “Boy, how he got all that out of me, I don’t know,” Jane laughed, for she had been very relaxed before the session. Her delivery had moved right along. I’ve deleted a few portions of the session that don’t apply to disease and evolutionary experimentation. Jane reported that when Seth gave the material on onchocerciasis she “really felt that the people’s skins were trying to turn into some sort of leathery protection. I don’t know whether I got those sensations from Seth, picked them up on my own, or just created them myself to go along with the material.” She hadn’t been aware of any feelings involving her own skin.

3. The disease Seth referred to is onchocerciasis, which is caused by a filarial parasite spread by the bite of the blackfly. In his passing reference to it, Seth didn’t mention that besides producing the gruesome leathery skin, onchocerciasis can cause blindness — hence its common name, river blindness. This most serious affliction appears to be centered in West Africa, and infects many millions of people there. Four centuries ago, it was carried to the Western Hemisphere by slaves, and is now found in certain areas of Mexico, south to Brazil.

Indeed, it seems that he probably has available enough information on the evolutionary aspects of disease to fill a book. To use his own word, it would be “fascinating,” should the three of us ever find the time to get to it. The whole idea of such biological experimentation makes us wonder just how, and to what extent, those impetuses may be involved with any of the “ordinary” diseases we’re so used to thinking of as just that — diseases.