“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

It seems that it is a fact that certain diseases are so transmitted. It seems the sheerest nonsense, on the other hand, to believe that illnesses are caused by spirits or demons. In each system of belief, the evidence however is overwhelming, and in the vast nature of reality both notions are equally beside the point, and one is no truer or more false than the other—a hard pill to swallow for modern man.

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.

I will not quibble with either of you, and I am not by any means justifying any of Ruburt’s methods, in the unfortunate restraint he has placed upon his body. I would like to make one remark: you do have many lives. Each person knows this on an unconscious basis. Some know it consciously. Any decisions made are made with that in mind.

You might decide, for example, to put all of your eggs in one basket in one life, knowing full well that in another you are taking a seemingly appropriate course of action. This is not the only life you will know. Any challenges, triumphs, or problems must be considered in that light.

If you had but one life to live, it would surely be a tragedy if you made any important errors. It would even be a tragedy if you made none—for whatever road you took would seem to be taken at the expense of numberless, perhaps more promising ones.

When he made his earlier choices, leading to his difficulty, he did so in a smaller context, and when he considers his condition, he still does so in the light of one life alone, therefore depriving himself of other knowledge, quite personal, that is available. You will note, if you keep track, that your high and low periods largely correspond, as this afternoon, and the period on Sunday.

You speed up the process of recovery by relaxing and trusting it. He tried to speed it up by negatively projecting present problems into the future, hoping to scare himself enough so that he would recover more quickly. The main methods, again, for him—one: read the statements in the morning, and when needed otherwise. Two: Ruburt should think of ideas and his writing in those hours devoted to it. He should allow himself creative freedom then. Three: he should remind himself that his desire and intent are impressing Framework 2, and that as much as possible he should relax his efforts here.

It is no tragedy, it is of no matter if on a particular day he thinks from the feeling of his legs he does not want to go out. There are periods of stability, as he knows, when he forgets the issue, and other periods when one leg is “working” more than the other.

Your own difficulties after shoveling become exaggerated because you also make a division between what you think of as your own mental life as opposed to the world’s physical orientation, as if in some way mental life makes you unfit for physical activity. The emphasis upon exercise is vastly overrated. And the most expert athlete can die in his tracks. The body is a mental expression, yet thoughts are physically expressed. There is no physical tremor that is not first a mental one.