“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“STATES OF HEALTH AND DISEASE”

Before we discuss the human situation more specifically in relationship to health and “dis-ease” — let us consider the so-called states of health and disease as they apply in planetary terms, and as they operate in all species. This will give us a far vaster framework in which to understand the ways in which each individual person fits into the entire picture.

Give us a moment … We will begin the next chapter, to be called: “States of Health and Disease” — the entire sentence in quotations.

I used quotation marks around the entire heading for this chapter to stress the point that the heading is written with your own ideas of health and disease in mind. Actually, however, regardless of appearances and misreadings of natural events, the very idea of disease as you usually think of it, is chauvinistic (louder) in health rather than in sexual terms.

Basically speaking, there are only life forms. Through their cooperation your entire world sustains its reality, substance, life, and form. If there were no diseases as you think of them, there would be no life forms at all. Your reality demands a steady fluctuation of physical and nonphysical experience. Most of you, my readers, understand that if you did not sleep you would die. The conscious withdrawal of mental life during life makes normally conscious experience possible. In the same way there must, of course, be a rhythm of physical death, so that the experience of normal physical life is possible. It goes without saying that without death and disease — for the two go hand in hand — then normal corporeal existence would be impossible.

(4:30.) For all of man’s fear of disease, however, the species has never been destroyed by it, and life has continued to function with an overall stability, despite what certainly seems to be the constant harassment and threat of illness and disease. The same is true, generally speaking, of all species. Plants and insects fit into this larger picture, as do all fish and fowl.

I have said elsewhere that no species is ever really eradicated — and in those terms no disease, or virus, or germ, ever vanishes completely from the face of the earth. In the first place, viruses change their form, appearing in your terms sometimes as harmless and sometimes as lethal. So-called states of health and disease are also changing constantly — and in those vaster terms disease in itself is a kind of health, for it makes life and health itself possible (all quite intently).

Later we will discuss what this means to you, the individual person, but for now I want to stress the fact that while it may seem natural enough to consider disease as a threat, an adversary or an enemy, this is not the case.

The subject matter of suffering is certainly vitally connected to the subject at hand, but basically speaking, disease and suffering are not necessarily connected. Suffering and death are not necessarily connected either. The sensations of suffering, and the pain, do exist. Some are indeed quite natural reactions, and others are learned reactions to certain events. Walking barefoot on a bed of fire would most likely cause most of you, my readers, to feel the most acute pain — while in some primitive societies, under certain conditions the same situation could result instead in feelings of ecstasy or joy.

We want to discuss “disease” as it exists apart from suffering for now, then. Then we will discuss pain and suffering and their implications. I do want to mention, however, that pain and suffering are also obviously vital, living sensations — and therefore are a part of the body’s repertoire of possible feelings and sensual experience. They are also a sign, therefore, of life’s vitality, and are in themselves often responsible for a return to health when they act as learning communications.

(4:50 p.m. “I’m glad I had it,” Jane said, “even though it’s late, ‘cause it’s got information you wanted. I did all right. I was able to clear my mind enough to give it.” She seemed to feel good, and I told her she’d done well. And the session had gone into the question I’d noted yesterday at the end of the session, about the roles of health and disease in our world. I was tired.