“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We had spent the earlier part of the evening trimming our Christmas tree. Now that it was done, with the multicolored lights shining through the branches and the tinsel, we prepared for the session. Beneath our living room windows, a carpenter pounded on an outside door frame as he repaired damage done to the ground floor of the house by the flood of last June [see the 613th session in Chapter One]. Beside this, the sound of additional hammering inside the house rose up through our floor; but none of this lasted long or interfered with the session.)

— to begin dictation: Physical existence is valuable for many reasons, one being that the flesh is so responsive to thought and yet so resilient. There are built-in guidelines so that the body consciousness itself, while mirroring your negative images at times, will also automatically struggle against them.

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.

So viruses can be beneficial or deadly according to the condition, state, and needs of the body at any given time. It is known that one disease can often cure another; sometimes, left alone, an individual will go from a serious disease through a series of less severe ones that are seemingly unrelated to the original problem.

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.

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.

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.