“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

In the world as you know it, it is quite natural to feel sad, or even despondent at times. These are portions of the emotional reality that are native to your kind. These are not negative states on their own, any more than twilight is less natural than dawn. They are not even unpleasant states on their own. It is natural, then, to feel depressed at times. No one constant emotional state is meant to prevail. There are gradations and nuances of feeling and sensation that sweep through your own experience, the result of quite natural variations. Your overall beliefs, however, can be so exaggerated in a negative manner that finally some people accept as valid the most negative picture of the world.

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.

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.

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.