“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Each system, of course, brings forth its own culture, “technology,” art, and science. The physical body is basically equipped to maintain itself as a healthy long-living organism far beyond your present understanding, medically speaking. The cellular comprehension⁸ provides all kinds of inner therapeutics that operate quite naturally. There is a physical give-and-take between the body and environment beyond that which you recognize; an inner dynamics here that escapes you, that unites the health of plants, animals, and men. In the most simple and mundane of examples, if you are living in a fairly well-balanced, healthy environment, your houseplants and your animals will also be well. You form your environment and you are a part of it. You react to it, often forgetting that relationship. Ideally, the body has the capacity to keep itself in excellent health — but beyond that, to maintain itself at the highest levels of physical achievement. The exploits of your greatest athletes give you a hint of the body’s true capacity. In your system of beliefs, however, those athletes must train and focus all of their attention in that direction, often at the expense of other portions of their own experience. But their performances show you what the body is capable of.

(Pause, in a slower delivery.) Many people, without knowing it, have developed cancer and rid themselves of it. Appendixes removed by operations have grown back. These powers of the body are biologically quite achievable in practical terms, but only by a complete change of focus and belief. Your insistence upon separating yourselves from nature automatically prevented you from trusting the biological aspects of the body, and your religious concepts further alienated you from the body’s spirituality.

Under certain conditions, therefore, the body can maintain itself while the “main consciousness” is away from it. The body consciousness is quite able, then, to provide the overall equilibrium. At certain levels of the sleep state this does in fact happen. In sleepwalking the body is active, but the main consciousness is not “awake.” It is not manipulating the body. The main consciousness is elsewhere. Under such conditions the body can perform tasks and often maneuver with an amazing sense of balance. This finesse, again, hints at physical abilities not ordinarily used. The main consciousness, because of its beliefs, often hampers such manipulability in normal waking life.

Now the physical organism as such is capable of that kind of reality system. It is not better or worse than your own. It is simply alternate behavior, biologically and spiritually possible. No complicated physical transportation systems were set up. In the physical state, in what you would call the waking state, these individuals slept. To you, comparatively speaking, their waking activities would seem dreamlike, and yet they behaved with great natural physical grace, allowing the body to function to capacity. They did not saddle it with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. Such bodies did not age to the extent now, that yours do, and enjoyed the greatest ease and sense of belonging with the environment.

The unknown reality: Much of that reality is unknown simply because your beliefs close you off from your own knowledge. The reaches of your own consciousness are not limited. Because you accept the idea of a straight-line movement of time, you cannot see before or after what you think of as your birth or death,* yet your greater consciousness is quite aware of such experience. Ideally it is possible not only to remember “past” lives, but to plan future ones now. In greater terms, all such lives happen at once. Your present neurological structure makes this seem impossible, yet your inner consciousness is not so impeded.

In those terms, Ruburt started from scratch as a member of your society who finally threw aside, as you did [Joseph], the current frameworks of belief. For some time he was simply between belief systems, discarding some entirely, accepting portions of others; but mainly he was a pioneer — and this while carrying the largely unrealized, basic belief of society that you cannot trust the self …

While that emotionally invisible belief is carried, then anything the self does must be scrutinized, put to the test; in the meantime beliefs that have sustained others are suspended. The development of Ruburt’s abilities would, therefore, lead him away from comforting structures while he searched for others to sustain him …

(In his material above, concerning Jane’s search for newer, larger frameworks of belief once she began to dispense with her old “comforting” ideas, Seth very lucidly dealt with certain aspects of the role she’s chosen for this life. However, I want to emphasize here the emotional terms of Jane’s search — and state that at times those qualities have been very difficult for her to contend with. To some degree I’ve been involved in many changes of belief also, but I’m a participator in the development of the Seth Material, not its originator; the pressures and challenges weren’t — aren’t — as demanding. [With a humor born out of many a struggle, however, I note that it isn’t easy to give up certain cherished old beliefs, even when they’re demonstrably wrong, they may fit the personality all too well…. ]

(2. Note 8 for the 679th session, on Jane’s beliefs and physical symptoms.