“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This afternoon Jane said she’d learned from Seth that we’d come down with those indispositions because we wanted to use our bodies’ immune systems; those structures needed the workouts, in other words. I’d had a vaguely similar thought this morning, and it had reminded me of my feelings on Saturday night—that our friend’s continual sneezing amid the group was actually a prolonged act of aggression.

Subject: Viruses as part of the body’s overall health system, and viruses as biological statements.

Viruses serve many purposes, as I have said before.¹ The body contains all kinds of viruses, including those considered deadly, but those are usually not only harmless, or inactive, but beneficial to the body’s overall balance.

The body maintains its vitality not only through the physical motion and agility that you perceive, but by microscopic agility, and actions within microseconds, that you do not perceive. There is as much motion, stimulation, and reaction in the interior bodily environment as the body meets through its encounters with the exterior environment. The body must now and then “flush its systems out,” run through its repertoire, raise its temperature (pause), activate its hormonal actions more strongly. In such ways it keeps its system of immunities clear. That system operates always. To some extent, it is a way that the body distinguishes between self and nonself.

(9:01.) In certain fashions (underlined), that system also keeps the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity. Otherwise it would be as if you did not know where your own house began or ended, and so tried to heat the entire neighborhood. So some indispositions “caused by viruses” are accepted by the body as welcome triggers, to clean out that system, and this applies to your present indispositions.

(Still quietly, but at a good pace:) When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of “foul viruses”—that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy (more vigorously).

(With a smile:) Your bodies had not received any such goodies in some time, so they exuberantly used them as triggers to regenerate the immune systems.

(Pause at 9:17.) There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses—in a fashion—again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient—but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.

All of this has to do with man’s intent and his understanding. The same relationships, however, do not only exist between human bodies, of course, but between man and the animals and the plants in the environment, and is part of the unending biological communication that overall produces the vitality of physical experience.

One note to Ruburt on vitamins: They are most effectively used for periods of two or three weeks, where they act as stimuli and reminders to the body. Then drop their use for two or three weeks, so that the body then produces by itself those elements you have reminded it you want. Any steady use of vitamins is not to your overall benefit, for you give the body what it needs too easily, and its ability to produce such material on its own becomes sluggish. Do you follow me?

(9:27.) Give us a moment…. Certain “diseases” are protections against other diseases, and the body on its own is its own excellent regulator.

Obviously those abilities operate best when you trust them. The body’s systems know what diseases are in the air, so to speak, and will often set up countermeasures ahead of time, giving you what you experience as an indisposition of one kind or another—but an indisposition that is actually a statement of prevention against another condition.

There is great traffic flow in a city: A body knows how to leap out of the way in a moment’s time from an approaching car. In the interior physical environment there is far greater traffic flow. There are decisions made in periods of time so brief you cannot imagine them—reactions that are almost over before they begin, reactions so fast you cannot perceive them as the body responds to its inner reality, and to all the stimuli from the exterior environment. The body is an open system. As solid as it seems to you, there are constant chemical reactions between it and the world, electromagnetic adjustments, alterations of balance, changes of relationships—alterations that occur between the body and its relationship with every other physical event, from the position of the planets and moon and the sun, to the position of the smallest grain of sand, to the tiniest microbe in anyone’s intestine (intently).