“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(3. During a conversation Jane and I had wondered why the members of the human species were so woefully ignorant of the internal structure of their own bodies. Not that we wanted or needed conscious control—but why didn’t we have the conscious visual knowledge of the workings of our various bodily parts, be they heart, liver, or whatnot?

Now: in answer to, in partial answer to, your question concerning conscious knowledge of the body’s workings, I have several things to say.

Perhaps primarily the answer lies in the necessity that man recognize the spontaneous source of his being. I will come back to that. More than that, however, your question of course reflects your cultural beliefs and assumptions, and so you do not realize that in some ways such conscious knowledge of the body’s workings might limit rather than expand concepts and experience of the body and the self.

I assume that by your question you mean, why does not man understand how his heart works? I confess that I do not quite know how to explain what I mean. In all the terms of common sense, of course our body is composed of organs—heart, liver, and so forth, and I mention them at times. You must understand, however, that the very terms are arbitrary to a certain extent.

In your terms, early man felt his body to be a living, independent extension of the earth itself, and of the land. His head, to him, was like space or the sky. His feet were like moving roots. He believed that his feelings were like the world’s winds that swept through his body. To him, his spirit was inside his skin. Blood flowed through him with refreshing life, as water flowed through the rivers, refreshing the land. In your terms of course he had a heart and liver, but those terms are still arbitrary.

Early man related to his insides, then, symbolically in a way that is now quite outside of your comprehension. He knew he needed rain and sun and food as the land did. He felt so at one with the land, he and his body, that “a conscious knowledge of it,” it in your terms not only would have inhibited his identification with nature, but his agility within it.

Such a knowledge as you suggest in actuality would not have added to his comprehension of his body, for he comprehended it very well. It would not have added to his health for example either, for he listened to his body so acutely that natural healings followed as he sought from nature what his body needed. Perhaps a more recent example would help. There have been articles (in the newspapers) about people dying of broken hearts after long periods of time, when hearts were simply regarded as mechanical pumps. No man’s knowledge will alone save him from heart failure, or heart difficulties, if such knowledge is not backed up by comprehensions of an entirely different order.

If you understand that people can die of broken hearts, however, in symbolic terms, then practically you may be able to use that knowledge. There have been many concepts of the body. You can deal as effectively with the body by regarding it in entirely different terms than you do.

Native cultures, believing that the courage or fleetness of an eaten animal became part of the hunter’s mental and physical acquisition, handled the body in entirely different terms, and did very well. You can say that you have a brain and heart and liver and appendix, and so forth, and muscles and bones, and insist that all of these work in a certain fashion, as of course they do. Cutting the body open will show those organs. You can say with equal validity that the body holds a man’s ghost, that it is filled also with the organs of all the animals a man has consumed—that one man has the heart of a lion, and in that framework that is true.

(10:00.) Physicians, perhaps, can be used as an example of men who do have a conscious knowledge of the body’s workings. They should indeed then be the healthiest of men. Obviously this is not the case. Man must be free to experience the body as he wishes, and to be aware of its spontaneous order.

Medically much can be done in your framework to alter bodily parts. The body is not just a physical entity, however, nor is its working completely the result of the condition of all of its parts. People in seemingly good health, for example, all parts functioning normally as far as you know, medically, can suddenly die, or become ill, while no reason can be found. Such cases can occur, among other reasons, because of relationships between or among bodily parts that in your terms do not have a physical status.

Early man, “stupidly” knowing nothing of the body’s organs, did not feel that particular kind of disorientation. Man has an inherent knowledge of his body. On some occasions specific knowledge of the various parts leads him to forget other issues, and leads to a mechanistic approach.

(10:18.) Give us a moment.... You have categorized by part, certainly it seems, the great part of emerging knowledge, when in your terms taboos were broken and medical men were allowed to dissect corpses, to see what was before hidden. Yet again, men who felt they had the fleetness of the gazelle, the heart of the lion, or whatever, did not need literal knowledge in your terms. It is quite correct to say that your body is composed of everything you have consumed, also—each bird, animal, and plant—that those qualities form your flesh, ever change their form.

A conscious knowledge of the eye’s working will not necessarily give you better vision. To a certain extent that system, while it has its advantages, is also limited and differently slanted in certain directions that can at least at times mitigate against the body’s health and well-being.

The body is given mechanistic qualities. The heart is a pump, for example, but everywhere there are examples where people act in an entirely different fashion. Medical men are taught that certain muscles or organs do thus and so. People who should have died ten years ago by such prognoses, still live, while others who it seems should have lived, died.

Man has a knowledge of his body. This need have nothing to do with detailed information about its parts. Each man feels his relationship with his body. Your belief structures have clouded the practical use of that knowledge, however.

Give us a moment.... As to Ruburt: the relationships between his bodily parts are being corrected. I am not speaking of stance here, but of those invisible relationships mentioned earlier, for he felt earlier as if he were literally a self divided, so that one part shouted discipline, and one shouted spontaneity. One shouted go ahead, one shouted slow down, be cautious, and these feelings of separateness were reflected in the body.

There have been considerable changes even since our last session, and I hope you have noted them. Feelings and emotion caused tensions under certain conditions that are not necessarily physically apparent, but that change the body. In your terms the body grows in time. So do beliefs. Ruburt is completely changing emotional and intellectual beliefs of long standing. His poor mobility did not exist alone, but reached back to an archaeology, say, of beliefs that affected his sinuses, jaw pressure, and so forth.

That archaeology is winding backward. The body is making excellent progress in an overall way. He goes through new stances quickly now. Even the smallest alteration of stance and muscular attitude affects the eyes. A child’s eye level is a tabletop. Ruburt got along well looking straight in front of him. The visual area is enlarging. The jaw pressures are constantly being minimized. This also requires changes in the eyes.

The entire posture required a tightening, however, of all muscles, including eye muscles. The body is letting down. You can, and you have, helped him by reminding him that this is safe, that the body’s protection and his own lies precisely in the body’s agility and quick response.

You have not done so yet, and that means something also. The same applies to the hot towels, and to the extent to which you are willing, even in small ways, to alter your way of life, to achieve desired ends. It means something that you do not make love more often, also, and I am not necessarily referring to hours of rollicking passion, either, but to an allotted time to the simple pleasure of body and mind together, and to a kind of communication that is important for its own sake.