“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.