“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(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.