“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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).

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.