“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The physical eruption, while it may appear to be a disaster in the area of the disease, is also, however, a part of the body’s defense system, taken to insure the whole balance of the body. Biologically, illness therefore represents the overall body defense system at work.

The body is geared then to act. It is pragmatically practical, and above all it wants to explore and to communicate. Communication implies a social nature. The body has within it inherently everything necessary for its own defense. The body itself will tease the child to speak, to crawl and walk, to seek its fellows. Through biological communication the child’s cells are made aware of its physical environment, the temperature, air pressure, weather conditions, food supplies — and the body reacts to these conditions, making some adjustments with great rapidity.

(Long pause.) If that assessment correlates with biological ones, you have a good working relationship with the body. It can react swiftly and clearly. When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger conditions. The body will, therefore, react to imagined dangers to some degree, as well as to those that are biologically pertinent. Its defense system often becomes overexerted as a result.

The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.

[...] It is easy to say that he overdid his defenses. (Pause.) Those defenses also served, however, to some degree (underlined) as a part of a larger learning process, and as a way of containing knowledge that he wanted and felt he required.

[...] You are quite correct: Ruburt spent many years “building up his defenses.” [...]

Exactly what were the mechanisms of such defense systems, as individuals used them? [...]

Not walking properly was an inappropriate defense mechanism no longer needed, a reaction in response to a program that made him feel unsafe.

[...] When you realize you dwell in a safe universe, such defenses are unnecessary—and later perhaps you will see that they are as comical as a child is who screams in terror at a bogeyman. [...]

[...] The body’s defense systems become confused to varying degrees.

[...] The body’s defenses will take care of themselves if they are allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true “carriers” of disease.

[...] Ruburt’s spontaneous self was by far the most active, and so his defenses against it, as the overly conscientious self, were more obvious than yours.

[...] Instead of (hypnotic) advisors, try to set up a dialogue, each of you, with the overly conscientious self, reminding it that spontaneity knows its own order—and that its defenses are overdone, with the best of good intent.

Behind all of this is the feeling that exposure is dangerous, that your true feelings must be hidden, and that the world is unsafe—hence your need for defenses. [...]

The constant line of chatter developed by your one brother (Loren, a year younger than I am) was of course a defense to close out the constant telepathic storm. Your young brother (William, 9 years younger) never set up adequate defenses, so that his own mood swung, willy-nilly, as the psychic climate varied.

Your defense was a creative one however. [...]

[...] defenses include agility, responsiveness, strength, dependability, good health—and instead I undermined those and set up artificial rigidities; did realize impossible as it sounds that Seth was right—constant anxiety and tenseness caused the whole thing; and DID resolve to let it all go.

[...] The ego will always erect defenses, but intuitional understanding has always been able to pierce such defenses.

[...] Two other sailors leaped to your defense, not out of great kindness of heart, mainly because they disliked him. [...]

[...] However her defense, which you recognize basically as insincere but superficially correct in this particular instance, was that your father hit her in the chest. [...]

[...] Jane didn’t ask for details on the case, but instead explained to the lawyer something of Seth’s ideas so that the attorney could use that material in his defense, making it clear that above all Seth was not for violence, even though the prosecuting attorney was evidently trying to make the defendant sound as though it was okay to kill because reincarnation was a fact: Since we all lived other lives, no one could really kill anyone. [...]

(Lest some hypothetical readers of this material in the future regard Jane and me as idiots, incapable of learning, I’d like to note in our own defense that we’ve made many efforts to put the symptom situation out of mind as much as we’re capable of, yet it doesn’t leave us. [...]

[...] They represent far greater security, defense, and strength. [...]

[...] Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body’s natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. [...]

[...] Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of various diseases, and filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what seems to be the body’s propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body’s vitality or natural defense system stressed.”

[...] For in it Seth not only discussed the body’s natural defenses and how it “immunizes itself,” but also examined our negative cultural beliefs about the body and disease. [...]

The body has many ways of accelerating its own defenses (cough). The so-called common cold is a case in point. [...]

[...] Even now local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters—equipment similar to Geiger counters. [...]

[...] When you leave that framework of belief, such self-protecting defensive mechanisms are no longer necessary. [...]

You react by setting up defenses. [...]

It is, therefore, the result of beliefs once helpful carried beyond their time —of defenses no longer needed. [...]

In fact, then, preventative medicine and outlandish expenditures for preventative defense are quite similar. In each case there is the anticipation of disaster — in one case from the familiar body, which can be attacked by deadly diseases at any time, and is seemingly at least without defenses; and in the other case from the danger without: exaggerated, ever-threatening, and ever to be contended with.

[...] In the same way, your government funds [also] go into military defenses to prevent war, because if you do not trust your own body’s good intent toward you, you can hardly trust any good intent on the part of your fellow men.

[...] He may even refer to those feelings of distrust as a dear frightened part of himself, and then, again, address that part of the self sympathetically — telling it why it need no longer be frightened, and vocally and emotionally stressing the fact that the frightened portion of the self no longer needs defenses, but can now allow itself free and natural expression.

[...] It began as a protection from, and a defense against, some of the mysteries of the natural world. [...]

It often seemed safer, even, to keep a certain distance from the material, lest you accept it too uncritically, and Ruburt’s critical stance was usually simply an unneeded defense, so that he could keep footing in both worlds at once. [...]

The child emotionally was almost paralyzed with terror, hence the thyroid condition, hence also the child’s quick motions, fast, frightened responses that were desperate defense mechanisms. [...]

[...] She said that even when Seth is talking about her, when she is balling herself out so to speak, she has no urge to interrupt him in her own behalf or defense.