“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’d forgotten Jane’s questions in the last session, about the inoculation of humans and animals.)

Now: in large part inoculation, and that type of preventative medicine, is the result of your particular methods of dealing with the world.

Give us a moment.... In historical times as you think of them, pre-industrial man had no need of those particular devices. He dealt with reality differently. It is not necessary to say his way was better, but it was vastly different. Some of this is most difficult to explain in any terms that will make sense, because the entire belief system of your times bears physical evidence of course, that such inoculations work.

The belief has been in the miraculous quality of science, under whose banner such inoculations began. There are, as I told you, literally endless ways of relating to the body and to the world; each one will work—at least enough so that the system seems to hold.

Specific inoculations are given under various conditions. They are bound to affect the biological system. The people who take such inoculations within your own culture, now, usually do so because they do not want the disease specified, and they believe that the inoculation will prevent it. It is impossible to tell ahead of time how many of those individuals would come down with the disease otherwise, yet diseases do come and go whether or not inoculations are given. The mechanisms operate in such a fashion that by now overall belief has come to such a point that the same results would almost be effected if an inoculation of no particular value were given instead. The mind is as effective against viruses as anything else—and in such hypothetical cases immune reactions would be set up biologically, through the mind’s beliefs.

You cannot afford that kind of method now, because you do not believe that the mind itself can help protect the body against disease caused by bacteria or virus. In many cases, whenever your culture and so-called primitive ones have met, inoculations worked, whether or not the natives believed in a particular inoculation, because they do believe in the “white man’s superior power,” and were as hypnotized by the white doctor’s mystique as they were by their medicine men.

The same applies in your treatment of animals. Animals respond to your feeling, your intent. You do not assign beliefs to animals. It seems inconceivable to grant to them anything approaching opinion or belief. It seems they are innocent of both. Animals in fact suffer greatly, for they often become so terrified of modern methods of medicine that an inoculation against one disease promptly brings about the occurrence of another.

Diseases have been wiped out through the use of inoculations. In past cultures, diseases have been wiped out through the intercession of good spirits. The specific nature of inoculations, however, means that more and more become necessary in that system, for the fear of each newly discovered disease becomes paramount—and no time is given, in your terms, now, for the body to respond naturally to those natural conditions, and therefore build up a natural immunity, biologically speaking.

A child is quite aware of its parents’ beliefs, and quite aware of the parents’ and the doctor’s authority. Inoculations have great magical effect upon children in that regard. Infants carry a strong telepathic connection with the mother, which is not severed for some time, so that inoculations given the infant can work in that regard, even as a child can also be protected in other systems when the mother calls upon the appropriate spirit.

You number viruses as people number demons. The cause of epidemics, say, is as I have given it in the early chapters of Mass Reality. It is considered to some extent superstitious to beware of preventative inoculations. And yet the body knows that all-in-all, ideally, it does not make sense to inflict even a minute infection or illness upon the body, to introduce foreign elements that have not naturally been accepted by the body in its own context. Therefore often such preventative inoculations—by inoculations I mean here any method of enforced introduction of disease—these methods often bring about other effects of an unfortunate nature.

Individual belief systems come into strong play, of course. You had difficulties yourself with the Salk (polio) vaccines. You were afraid to take the treatment and afraid not to. You each had complications. On another occasion you received inoculations—I believe a rabies treatment in California.

You would not have had difficulty without the inoculation. At the time you did suffer a state of shock initially, but the body could handle that. You need general inoculations now, in the society at large, with children’s diseases and so forth, because the belief in the inoculations is so strong.