“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Health and illness are both evidences of the body’s attempt to maintain stability. There is a difference in the overall health patterns in men and animals because of the quite diverse nature of their physical experience. More will be said about this particular subject later. Overall, however, in the animals illness and disease play a life-giving role, keeping balance both within a species and between them, therefore insuring the future existence of all involved.

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

Man is so highly verbal that he finds it difficult to understand that other species work with idea-complexes (with a hyphen) of a different kind, in which of course thought as you consider it is not involved. But an equivalent exists; using an analogy, it is as if ideas are built up not through sentence structure reinforced by inner visual images, but by like “mental” patterns structured through touch and scent — in other words, thinking, but within a framework entirely different and alien to you.

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them. They became frightened of disease, particularly in the case of plagues.

Man forgot the teaching and healing elements, and concentrated instead upon the unpleasant experience itself. To some extent this was quite natural, for the new species developed in order to change the nature of its consciousness, to follow a reality in which instinct was no longer “blindly” followed, and to individualize in strong personal focus corporeal experience that had previously taken a different pattern.

Now: Man has a far greater leeway. He forms his reality according to his conscious beliefs, even while its basis lies in the deep unconscious nature of the earth in corporeal terms. Man’s “I am,” [seemingly] apart from nature — a characteristic necessary for the development of his kind of consciousness — led him into value judgments, and also necessitated some break with the deep inner certainties of other species.

In certain eras, the lines between the species were not completely drawn, and there were long periods where men and animals mixed and learned from each other. Man’s imagination made him a great maker of myths. Myths as you know them represent bridges of psychological activity, and point quite clearly to patterns of perception and behavior through which, in your terms, the race passed as it traveled to its present state. Mythology bridges the gap between instinctive knowledge and the individualization of idea.

A human being, however, has another dimension to deal with, a new area of creativity, a diverse mixture of beliefs. His or her ideas about the self must be examined, for they are being materialized in flesh. Again, the situation has great complexity, for the condition is still a healthy attempt on the part of the body to maintain balance. Overall there is also the world situation to be taken into consideration — the status of the species on the planet, in which, say, overpopulation problems will bring about death to insure new growth.

Their migration is perfect in its simplicity and complexity, yet your journey as a species is far less predictable, opening avenues of probabilities in which your consciousness and free will allows you to become conscious creators in worlds that you initiate and then inhabit.