“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.... There are for example pressures that do not show, strained relationships between, say, organs that are not apparent medically. These can best be symbolically stated, and would always represent states of mind or feeling. They affect bodily behavior, however, and bodily experience, and are far more important to health in basic terms.

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.

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.

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.