“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night’s session had presented some new information about animal dreams. We’ll get a copy of it at next week’s class. Those sessions are recorded; then during the week a dedicated class member goes to all the work of transcribing the tape and having the script duplicated.

Health and illness are both evidences of the body’s attempt to maintain stability. There is a difference in the overall health patterns in men and animals because of the quite diverse nature of their physical experience. More will be said about this particular subject later. Overall, however, in the animals illness and disease play a life-giving role, keeping balance both within a species and between them, therefore insuring the future existence of all involved.

In their own ways, the animals are quite aware of this fact. Some of them even bring themselves to their own destruction through what you would call suicide, and en masse. At that level the animals understand, and are always in touch with deep biological connections in which they know their own continuances within the chain of nature.

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

Instinct is fairly accurate, for example, guiding the beasts to those territories in which proper conditions can be found; and even for them the well-being of the body represents physical evidence of their “being in the proper place at the proper time.” It reinforces the animals’ sense of grace, in terms mentioned earlier in this book. (See the 636th session in Chapter Nine.)

(Intently:) They understand the beneficial teaching quality of disease, and follow their own instinctive ways of treating it. In a natural situation, this might involve a mass migration from one territory to another. In such cases the illness of only a few animals might send a whole herd to its safety, and a new food supply.

Such “thinking” exists, using the analogy, within the framework of instinct, whereas your own verbalized thoughts can also intrude outside of that framework. One of the main differences between you and the animals, and one of the significant meanings in terms of free will, is involved here.

Animals, then, understand the beneficial directing elements of disease. They also comprehend the nature of stress as a necessary stimulant to physical activity. Observing even a pet, you will notice its marvelous complete relaxation, and yet its immediate total response to stimulus. So animals in captivity will fight to provide themselves with necessary health-giving stress factors.

Animals, then, do not think of illness in terms of good or bad. Disease in itself on that level is a part of the life-survival process, and a system of checks and balances. With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved. Mankind feels its own mortality even more than the beasts do.

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them. They became frightened of disease, particularly in the case of plagues.

(1. How idea structures work in animals as opposed to mankind.

(2. The use of animals — rats, say — in experiments involving injections, before giving them to human beings. [Man’s psychological reality is so sweepingly different from that of the animals, Jane added now, that he would inevitably show a wide variety of reactions.]

An individual who had himself survived many diseases was considered a sage. Such people often watched the animals and observed nature’s own therapies and treatments.

In certain eras, the lines between the species were not completely drawn, and there were long periods where men and animals mixed and learned from each other. Man’s imagination made him a great maker of myths. Myths as you know them represent bridges of psychological activity, and point quite clearly to patterns of perception and behavior through which, in your terms, the race passed as it traveled to its present state. Mythology bridges the gap between instinctive knowledge and the individualization of idea.

When an animal is sick it immediately begins to remedy the situation, and unconsciously it knows what to do. It does not bother thinking in your terms of good and evil. It does not wonder what it did to get into such a situation. It does not think of itself as inferior. It automatically begins its own therapy.

(11:21.) The individuals alive at such a time will also have a hand in such decisions, however. Once more, because you are self-conscious beings your beliefs regulate your reality. An animal knows unconsciously that it is unique and has a place in the scheme of being. Its sense of grace is built-in. Your free will allows for the freedom of any belief, including one that says you are unworthy, with no right to your existence.

This knowing will give you the conscious knowledge that is a counterpart of the animal’s unconscious comprehension.

(Jane said there was much more to the idea of natural therapy in animals. She began tuning in to this information on her own, rather than getting it through one of Seth’s channels. Ages ago, humans not only watched the animals, but went to them for help. It had to do with shock treatment, she said wonderingly. If a human was in a catatonic state after a battle, for instance, the “animal medicine man” would purposely shock the patient into an emotional reaction to bring him out of the state.

(“I think these animal doctors were a variety of apelike ancestor,” Jane said. “Not apes as we think of them, but a bridge between animals and human beings. They were our size, more or less. They weren’t four-footed. I saw creatures who walked upright — hairy, with brilliant compassionate eyes….”

Now: An animal has no need of conscience, in any terms.