“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For all of life’s seeming misfortunes, development, fulfillment, and accomplishment far outweigh death, diseases, and disasters. Starting over can be done — by anyone in any situation, and it will bring about some beneficial effects regardless of previous conditions.

Before health problems show up there is almost always a loss of self-respect or expression. This loss may occur in the environment itself, in changing social conditions. In the matter of the disease called AIDS, for example, you have groups of homosexuals, many “coming out of the closet” for the first time, taking part in organizations that promote their cause, and suddenly faced by the suspicions and distrust of many other portions of the population.

(3:35.) These beliefs break down the immunity system, and bring about the symptoms so connected with the disease. AIDS is a social phenomenon to that extent, expressing the deep dissatisfactions, doubts, and angers of a prejudiced-against segment of society.

The attitude even of doctors and nurses toward the handling of such patients shows only too clearly not only their fear of the disease itself, but their fear of homosexuality, which has been considered evil and forbidden by many religions. Emotions run at top pace in such cases, and the AIDS patients are often shunted away, out of human society. Often even their friends desert them. Yet AIDS can be acquired by those who are not homosexuals, but who have similar problems. (Long pause.) It is a great error to segregate some individuals, like some modern colony of lepers.

Luckily, the disease will run its course as sociological conditions change, and as man’s inhumanity to man becomes clear even to the most prejudiced.

Many other diseases that seem to be spread by viruses or contagions are also related to the problems of society in the same manner, and when those conditions are righted the diseases themselves largely vanish. It should be remembered that it is the beliefs and feelings of the patients that largely determine the effectiveness of any medical procedures, techniques, or medications.

Unfortunately, the entire picture surrounding health and disease is a largely negative one, in which even so-called preventative medicine can have severe drawbacks, since it often recommends drugs or techniques to attack a problem not only before the problems emerges, but simply in case it may emerge.

Many of the public-health announcements routinely publicize the specific symptoms of various diseases, almost as if laying out maps of diseases for medical consumers to swallow. There are many techniques apart from medically conventional ones, such as acupuncture, the laying on of hands, or the work of people who may be known as healers. The trouble is that these other techniques cannot be monitored sufficiently so that their benefits can be honestly appraised.

We have been dealing with quite drastic diseases, but the same concepts are true in other areas also. There are people who undergo a series of highly unsatisfactory relationships, for example, while another person might experience a series of recurrent diseases instead. In spite of all problems, the life force operates continually in each person’s life, and can bring about at any time the most profound, beneficial changes. The idea is to clear the mind as much as possible from beliefs that impede the fine, smooth workings of the life force, and to actively encourage those beliefs and attitudes that promote health and the development of all aspects of healing experience.