“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: it may seem to most people that an exuberant, always-vital, energetic, healthy body would indeed be one of the greatest gifts of all—a body that never worried or showed signs of any disorder, a body that went ahead on its own, so to speak, propelled by feelings of strength and vigor. This certainly sounds like a fine ideal. Yet I tell you that in such a body you would finally feel like a prisoner, for your moods and reflections, your feelings and your thoughts, would find no responsive mirror in your flesh.

It is natural and healthy to yearn for a comfortable body if you are in health difficulties. The body, however, is not an assumed facade, but the physical materialization in your world of your inner being. All of nature is responsive, pliant, changing, each part connected with each other part. It is quite natural, then, that during a lifetime you experience various assorted periods of temporary illness.

These will be caused by your beliefs and your feelings, but they will not be necessarily negative at all, but a demonstration of the body’s responsiveness. It is not realistic to expect a life of unending, exuberant health, with no momentary lapses of any kind.

(9:37.) Such momentary lapses follow personal and cultural patterns. Some generations fall heir to certain fashionable diseases, for example. The body copes with inner and exterior reality, and performs a marvelous job of maintaining multitudinous balances.

Ideally, the body would always right itself after such lapses from exuberant health—but even those lapses often exercise that resiliency. Maintaining that resiliency, then, is the important issue. Many such lapses are exaggerated because of your beliefs, so that they are experienced in a more drastic form than necessary. Generally drugs impede that resiliency.

The mind may want to react. The individual may realize that his or her pace has been too fast, and so natural feelings bring about a lethargy of body, or a slight fever, or an indisposition—all quite natural, resilient activities. I do not want this ever to be interpreted to mean, a priori, and in conventional terms, that “suffering is good for the soul.” A reliance and faith in the natural self, however, would be large enough to accept certain indispositions without fear, panic, or doubt. With the best of intent most public health announcements shout the symptoms of critical diseases to the skies, so that the smallest of indispositions becomes the trigger for personal fear on the part of millions. Such announcements actually teach people to fear what might be happening within the body. There is a stress upon disease rather than health.

(9:50.) Give us a moment.... There are also, as I have said before, diseases that come and go, of the so-called killing variety. The inner problem is solved and the disease vanishes. People are not aware of this, and so they are unfamiliar with the great healing benefits provided by the body.

Those feelings about time, and the way you handled them, seemed to make your own time shrink. On top of that, you projected worries into the future as well. Your body, very wisely, stepped in. It short-circuited you for a while. You were too weak to worry.

At the same time, you could not enjoy such enforced idleness—far be it from that—so the period was highly unpleasant. This was to help you save face: you didn’t take time out because you wanted to, but because you were so miserable that you could not work—and then yelled out in outrage that the body so betrayed you. The body’s resiliency gave you the breathing space that you needed, and would not take consciously. It was responsive to your own desires and needs, where you consciously were not.

Not only singly, then, but jointly people are related through their body’s responsiveness to other issues.

Now: you can depress the body and the mind through certain drugs, destroying that great natural resiliency. A concentration upon negative thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of all else, will depress the mind and body as surely as any drugs.

Even in your culture you are presented with multitudinous fields of interest and stimuli. Those who consistently choose negative patterns program themselves in those areas, gradually alter the chemical balances within the body. You cannot separate health from philosophy. Each individual has his or her own idea of reality.

I said that the body’s resiliency is far more important than any other consideration. You live in a cultural world. I cannot make decisions for you, based upon your social mores. Ruburt can save the majority of his teeth. Now in certain terms that would be considerable—that is, an achievement. In certain times people lost their teeth, when they did, as Ruburt has, and in a natural fashion. They simply dropped out of your head. The unlucky ones had to have them pulled, by the most torturous of processes. Lucky ones like Ruburt went on chomping merrily with the teeth that were kept, and with the gums between that became quite adequate for the necessary procedures.

Ruburt is not going to be satisfied with such a state, however, nor would you, for in your society it does not work that way. You are concerned with cosmetics. Ideally, Ruburt can regenerate the gums overnight. Practically, the gums are being regenerated, as the rest of his body definitely is. If he does not have his teeth out, he will probably lose two more that are very loose—but not for one or two years. By that time the rest of the teeth will be solid enough to stay in his head, and be operative. One tooth is in the back and probably would not bother him, since no one can see it anyhow. The other would be noticeable. That is your answer—

(10:30.) Now: his body is making an excellent readjustment, as it becomes more and more flexible. I tell you that the recovery is more or less assured—as long as he does not backtrack in beliefs. When he learns he learns, however, so I do not expect backtracking. It might seem that all of this should happen without any soreness, that he should simply feel better and better, but such an attitude would also attempt to deny the body’s resiliency, and to short-circuit it.

The muscles and ligaments have their own characteristics. The body must maintain its overall balance. As Ruburt definitely recovers, certain muscles not adequately used in the past must regain not only agility but strength, and begin to stretch to their natural capacity. They will be sore at times. This is not a negative pattern, however. The very soreness is a sign of the muscle’s reaction—its life.

It is vital that this be understood.. The improvements are well-enough along so that many portions of the body are being affected at once, rather than simply local changes.

You affect matter all the time, of course, including the matter of your bodies. To some extent you breathe “life” into your machinery. Geller must be a performer, with all the characteristics that implies. He displays the obvious, but that obvious is not at all obvious to most people, and so they need the lesson.

(Robert Monroe wrote Journeys Out of the Body.)