“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The case was startling, again, because of the obvious suicidal acts. The poison was, after all, left as evidence. Had the same number of people been found dead (pause) of a vicious disease — smallpox or whatever — the virus involved would have been the villain. I want to discuss thoughts and viruses, along with the health of the body.

You think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. You should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times you have both asked why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.

(Pause at 9:16.) Your physical body … give us time … is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts. It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will have to use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if your thoughts turned into the various appendages of your body. (Emphatically:) They have an invisible existence within your body as surely as viruses do. Your body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers (long pause, eyes open) all of the body’s inner responses. When you think thoughts, they are conscious. You think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which you are unaware.

So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. [...] Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.

[...] In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses,¹ for they are alive, always present, responsive, and possess their own kind of mobility. Physically speaking at least, thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.

Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. [...]

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.

[...] 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).

(Pause.) Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. [...] Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. [...]

Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. [...] It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.

(“All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. [...] You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. [...]

[...] You are not attacked by viruses, for instance, for all kinds of viruses exist normally in the body. There are no killer (underlined) viruses, then, but viruses that go beyond their usual bounds. [...]

This means, of course, that you do not fall victim to a disease, or catch a virus, but that for one reason or another your own feelings, thoughts, and beliefs lead you to seek bouts of illness. [...]

(Long pause.) People have been taught that their bodies are a kind of battleground, and that they must be in a constant state of readiness lest they be attacked or invaded by alien germs or viruses or diseases that can strike without warning.

[...] Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, any more than a cat does when it devours a mouse. The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events are also the results of beliefs. In the greater sphere of spiritual and biological activity, the viruses are protecting life at their level, and in the capacity given them.

(Even though Seth didn’t call last Monday’s 867th session book dictation, then, Jane and I presented it because his material on viruses, disease, health, and biological experimentation obviously complemented his themes for Mass Events. [...]

(My questions had been rearoused because of an article I’d read a few days ago in a scientific journal; in their piece the authors explained that a certain significant percentage of women can develop cervical cancer from contact with a virus carried by the sperm of males who haven’t had vasectomies — or who haven’t been sterilized, in other words. [...] What if researchers next find out that in some as-yet-unsuspected manner, the female can in turn pass on a cancer-causing virus to her mate?

(According to him, tonight’s session after 9:52 isn’t book material either, but Jane and I are presenting it here because in it Seth returns to questions I’d asked earlier in Mass Events: What about the roles played in human affairs by viruses like smallpox? [...]

Though scientists might find “cancer cells,” and though it might seem that cancer is caused by a virus, cancer instead involves a relationship, say, between what you might think of as a host and parasite, in those terms — and to some extent the same applies to any disease, including smallpox, though the diseases themselves may appear to have different causes completely. [...]

[...] The mind is as effective against viruses as anything else—and in such hypothetical cases immune reactions would be set up biologically, through the mind’s beliefs.

You cannot afford that kind of method now, because you do not believe that the mind itself can help protect the body against disease caused by bacteria or virus. [...]

Again, most difficult to explain—for if you believe that diseases are carried by viruses and by bacteria, then the evidence is overwhelming in that regard.

The very existence of certain kinds of viruses provides safety against many other diseases, whether or not those viruses even exist in an active manner. [...]

[...] Many viruses inherently capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.

If [certain viruses] are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become “deadly.” [...]

[...] The mental state brings about the activation of a virus that is, in those terms, passive.

(9:46.) Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in your terms there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what you think of as deadly ones. The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call (underlined) an inactive form — inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. [...]

There are multitudinous species of viruses and so forth that man has not encountered and recognized, and there are connections between viruses and other species of living matter that remain unknown. [...]

I have said elsewhere that no species is ever really eradicated — and in those terms no disease, or virus, or germ, ever vanishes completely from the face of the earth. In the first place, viruses change their form, appearing in your terms sometimes as harmless and sometimes as lethal. [...]

[...] You might think, for example, of the body being invaded by viruses, or attacked by a particular disease, and these ideas, then, may make you question. [...]

[...] In the meantime, however, scientists and medical men find more and more viruses against which the population “must” be inoculated. [...] There is a rush to develop a new inoculation against the newest virus. Much of this is on a predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many people might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths. [...]

When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.

[...] In the second place, there is a difference between a virus produced in the laboratory and that inhabiting the body — a difference recognized by the body but not by your laboratory instruments.

(As stated I fell ill with the virus in March 1965. I was also troubled by a virus in 1964, sometime between January and March; I was not in the habit of noting such things in the sessions then, so have no accurate record. [...]

In the past a virus operated of a peculiar kind. [...]

[...] The subconscious bargain was this: For relative freedom the rest of the year, you settled for a virus that would hit you any time between January and March 20.

[...] Partially, these are also victims of beliefs, for you believe that the natural body is the natural prey of viruses and diseases over which you have no personal control, except as it is medically provided. [...]

[...] There was no physical virus that spread through the multitude. [...]

[...] They are no more bad or evil in their own way, say, than viruses are in theirs. [...]

(I spent eight or nine days in bed, the victim of what is generally called a virus. At no time however did I blame a virus, feeling that the real cause was psychic, thus permitting the virus to come to the fore. [...]

[...] He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his body itself was invaded despite his will. [...]

[...] He is usually convinced instead that his body has been invaded by a virus despite his own personal approval or disapproval — despite his own personal approval or disapproval (most emphatically). [...]