“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must remember that you dwell always in a natural framework — which means that your thoughts themselves are as natural, say, as the locks of your hair. In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses,¹ for they are alive, always present, responsive, and possess their own kind of mobility. Physically speaking at least, thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.

So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.

Now in the context of usual Western learning, and with the introduction of modern drugs, you are in somewhat of a quandary. The body knows how to handle “natural” drugs coming directly from the earth — whether ground or boiled, minced or steamed. A large variety of “manufactured” drugs offer an unfamiliarity to the body’s innate structure, which can lead to strong defense mechanisms. These are often aimed directly against the drug instead of the disease itself. Such a situation means that you must then use another drug to counteract the one just given.

(Pause at 9:58.) I am not suggesting that you not visit doctors or not take drugs of that nature, as long as you believe in the structure of medical discipline that the Western world has evolved. Your bodies have been conditioned to it through the use of such medications since birth. There are many casualties, but this is still a system that you have chosen, and your ideas still form your reality. No one dies who has not made the decision to do so — and no disease is accepted blindly. Put simply, your thoughts can be regarded as invisible viruses, carriers, sparks setting off reactions not only within the body but the entire physical system as you know it.

Your thoughts are as natural as the cells within your body, and as real. They interact with one another as viruses do. While you are in this reality there is no division between the mental, the spiritual, and the physical. If you think there is, then you do not sufficiently understand the spirituality of the flesh or the physical reality of your thought.

Now: As stated, thoughts are as natural as any portion of the body. They are as much a part of nature as feelings are, but if you set up an arbitrary division — considering thoughts mental as distinguished from the physical — then your body may give a truer reflection of your being than your thoughts do.

In the body’s spontaneous functioning you see the easy mobility of the soul, the “going with that which I am,” which is an indication of the soul’s inner freedom and yet innate sense of direction. All portions of the body’s reality are versions in flesh of the soul’s reality, even as all segments of the exterior universe mirror an internal one. The latter is as alive and natural and changing as the exterior world. Physical phenomena is only a portion of what nature is, and all realities are natural.

In your terms, probabilities are extensions and variations on the growth principle that is quite obvious in your daily reality. Such growth is a natural manifestation flourishing within your particular area of actuality, observable to your senses. Again, other entirely natural manifestations of that principle exist. Some can only be glimpsed in distorted form because of other “natural” conditions that you cannot perceive. Probabilities involve you with a rich psychological growth and development, present but not observable in your “home ground.” Any kind of existence happens within the context of nature, and nature includes the soul. Your definition of nature has simply been too limiting.

It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. It is natural for you to have probable selves as well as reincarnational existences.²

When you consider ideas as mental and apart from nature, then you feel separated from nature itself. When you imagine a life after death as unnatural or supernatural then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered. You must try to understand that there are different kinds of nature within Nature — and a capital for the last one. Your physical life — your human nature — is, in your terms, dependent upon a time when you were not. You must realize that not being in that connotation is quite as natural as physical being. Your existence before and after death is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.