“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The physically alive body, its activities and condition, are directed through the beliefs of the conscious mind. The body, as explained in this chapter, also has “invisible” counterparts composed of the electromagnetic properties and the interior sound and light qualities.

These invisible structures preceded the emergence of the physical body. They also exist after the body’s death. While the condition of the body is directed by the conscious mind in life, then, the idea or mental pattern for the body existed before the conscious mind’s connection with the physical brain.

Therefore the inner self forms, first, the “invisible” body structure which will “later” emerge in flesh. At the event of this mental seeding, the conscious mind, in your terms, is obviously not connected with the brain, which has not yet been formed in flesh. The idea of the body is held and made physical by a conscious mind.

New paragraph: Consciousness then is not dependent upon physical perception, though this attribute does require an awareness immersed within a material form. While physical consciousness is sifted through the bodily apparatus, you are usually unaware of noncorporeal kinds because of that process. The general framework, properties and characteristics of the body exist, therefore, before its formation. In simple terms, you choose ahead of time the kind of body you will inhabit and impress. It may seem to you that you do not have any conscious control over your body’s condition in life as you know it, much less before your birth. You have been taught that there is little connection between your thought and your body’s activities.

(9:29.) A man believing he has heart trouble will finally, through his own anxiety, affect the functioning of his “involuntary” system until his heart is definitely harmed if the belief goes unchecked. The conscious mind directs the so-called involuntary systems of the body, and not the other way around. No idea slips insidiously past your awareness to affect your involuntary system unless it fits in with your own conscious beliefs. Once more, you will not be sick if you think you are well — but there may be other ideas that make you believe in the necessity for poor health.

You are not aware of how the body performs its many involuntary functions. The conscious mind could not handle all that data, but those functions perfectly mirror your consciously held ideas and beliefs.

Within the basic framework of the body chosen before physical birth (for reasons that will be discussed later), the individual has full freedom to create a perfectly healthy functioning form. The form is, however, a mirror of beliefs, and will accurately materialize in flesh those ideas held by the conscious mind.

That is one of the body’s primary functions. A sick body is performing that function then, in its way, as well as a healthy one. It is your most intimate feedback system, changing with your thought and experience, giving you in flesh the physical counterpart of your thought. So it is futile to become angry at a symptom, or to deride the body for its condition when it is presenting you with the corporeal replica of your own thought, as it was meant to do.

Your environment and your experience in the physical world also provide you with the same kind of feedback. It is just as useless to berate your environment or your experience in it as it is to deride your body, for the same reasons.

You are, however, in physical existence using your body as a medium for learning and expression. You are each unique. (Pause.) Many of you for your own reasons pursue courses that do not involve an even development of abilities, an overall balanced picture, for example, but choose to express and experiment with certain qualities to the exclusion of others. Such a course would not, in physical reality, present you with anything like a balanced picture of perfection.

(Pause.) Before physical birth then you form a mental concept of the body you will have. This image is impressed into matter in this way: You tune yourself into a highly specific dimension of reality. You form a physical structure that will have existence within that intensely concentrated area, that will have validity and actuality — that will come alive within those “frequencies” (very positively).

The brain with its bodily connections must deal with the time lapses that sensual perception always imply. The interior workings of the body, to be conscious, would have to deal with time sequences that would present the physically attuned consciousness with “mathematical” deductions and calculations far too numerous for it to handle. For example, it would have to keep conscious track of all the muscles, nerves, organs, cells, molecules and atoms, while manipulating the body in space and time.

Therefore a seeming division occurs, in which a portion of the invisible conscious mind is connected with the physical brain, and a portion of it is free of that connection. That [latter] part forms what you think of as the involuntary system of the body.

3. Here Seth refers to the way the nervous impulse passes from one neuron, or nerve cell, to the next as it traverses the body’s nervous system. The junction between two neurons is called the synapse.