“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For many centuries (pause) the structure of the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation—and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church’s concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined) come from God—an unwelcome gift, perhaps—but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. It meant you were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before.

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing (pause), or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man’s suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: You simply give the machine some better parts and all will be well (amused). Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly work miracles: The new heart will give a man new heart, for example.

One man might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve failure. A person might use it as a means of showing pride or humility, of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important. [Sickness] can be a badge of honor or dishonor—but there can be no question, when you look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another.