“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?

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.

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.

Give us a moment.... For example, in your culture some people feel that there is a struggle between their hearts and their heads, a conflict between emotion and reason, in other words. In many cases, now, meaning not in all, such feelings set up quite invisible but definite alienations, or lacks of balance, between the heart and the brain, so that delicate relationships between them are upset. Those relationships affect physical organs, but the medical profession is not used to thinking in terms of relationships that cannot appear under a microscope.

(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.

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.