Welcome to this week’s “zine”:

by Mark M

Leading question:

What was the farmer doing in the dell anyway?

———=———

Some excerpts from my chapbook Scraps and Frags (2003):

They drove over in overdrive.

kidhood – the malformative years…

Try as he might, he could not get his excrement together.

A bird in each hand is worth almost as much as two in a cage.

The futility of car alarms: Ever respond to someone else’s going off? I don’t call the cops either. Car alarms cry wolf.

Doctor: I can find nothing wrong with you. You’re a hypochondriac.

Patient: Doctor, what can I take to cure my hypochondria?

Placebo effect – faith-healing in pill form.

On the verge of being on the verge.

love lovers

lust lusters

infatuation infatuationers

in love

in lust

infatuation

It must have been an optical delusion.

I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry.

S/he’s another unique specimen in God’s collection of human beings.

Today is a day.

What goes up must come down — save for body weight.

The Mason-Dixie Line.

[[]]

Small yet insignificant.

Humor is in very short supply in most religions, ever knowtice that?

About the Author

The author is a person.

———=———

Jeanne Denney originally hails from Missouri, has lived elsewhere such as New York, but now lives in Racine.

She is the founder of the School of Unusual Life Learning or SoULL.

Here is some more information about her:

Q: Initially, your career was in structural engineering. What led you away from that?   

A: So many things. The most obvious answer was the death of my mother and 9/11.  I was living in the NYC area, raising 4 kids, designing movable bridges and studying healing arts before these two events.  I had already planned to make a move into working directly with healing and helping work, one day.  But when Mom died rather suddenly from post-surgical complications in January 2002 (just after 9/11 in New York), the door to the larger story of life opened wide for me.  I had been with her through the surgery and after, so I was quite close to the process.  Anyway, the penny dropped.  Several months later I initiated my retirement from engineering and began hospice work.  Exposure to dying really changed something in my whole way of seeing life and the world, as it does for so many people.  

Q: What have been some of the SoULL course topics?   

A: Such a difficult question. I would like to say only one:  How body and consciousness changes throughout life, or “life movement.”  But in our culture and language that just makes people confused:  “What do you mean by…life movement?”  Often people think that we only study death in SoULL (because we do study death). Since we avoid talking about death in 21st-century America, if I mention Death, it absorbs all of the attention.   Basic death knowledge is one important topic, because there is no right understanding of Life without it, but there are many more. 

What happens when you start to recognize Death as an important LIFE process is that everything else changes.  Really just about everything, because our culture is quite rigged up to a nonsensical idea of Life vs. Death.  It is totally a cultural construction that the body does not understand as true.  As a result, when we learn about death and watch the body closely, everything changes.  Our ideas of relationships change, our ideas of aging change, our ideas of community change too,  And quite surprisingly for many people, we become more deeply connected.  So actually, the school works to provide insights and solutions to many very vast topics of concern in our time.  We don’t shrink from vastness.  

Another important topic is what I call the “deep, intrinsic regulation” of our bodies (that includes aging) and our connection to Nature, which is our most profound resource for health and sanity.  We take the body and its teachings very seriously.  

Q: What brought you to Racine? What year? 

A: I moved to Racine in January of 2019.   I was looking to leave the East Coast, and had looked up the West Coast, in Colorado, etc.  But it was clear, after several years of searching, that I wanted to move back to the Midwest.   I grew up in the Midwest (Missouri). I love the ease of life here, the history, the beauty, and even the issues.  Racine for me is a marvelous microcosm of the U.S. Everything in miniature. This town provides an incredible opportunity to integrate my personal history and study the larger patterns of human behavior that we think about in the school. It is also a remarkably healthy community in many ways that don’t cease to delight me. Finally, the kind of therapy work I do (somatic or body centered therapy) does not have so many providers in this region, so bringing that to the Midwest felt meaningful to me.  

Here are some one-line poems by Jeanne, who also writes poems of more “standard” length:

1

This American life is expensive. Few of us can afford it.

2

Beware of ice palaces built in hearts with chisels.

3

The doctor cannot be above the illness.

4

Because I was raised to wear sheep’s clothing, I am often mistaken for a wolf.

5

We manifest inside of those things that we have already surrendered to.

6

This is the intelligent way out of all firestorms: Sell your fear to the ocean.

7

And I said to the trees: “I am sorry for what has happened to you.”

(c) Jeanne Denney

———=———

Billionaires in the “midst” of homelessness and so forth are proof that there is a serious flaw to capitalism. Disaster capitalism is a prime example. The top 10 U.S. billionaires got $1 billion richer every day of the pandemic.

Jeanne Denney wrote the following upon learning that billionaire investor Bill Ackman turned $27 million into $2.6 billion by betting that the coronavirus would tank the market.

“Billionaires of America,
there is still time to save
your soul…

“Share something now.
Support small business,
hire the unemployed, buy
student debt, make masks
and gloves, feed the
hungry, house the
homeless. We know you
don’t know how to do
this, but really…all is not
lost.”

(c) Jeanne Denney

A person with “only” one billion dollars is a millionaire 1000 times over, an extremely severe dollar-hoarding problem.

And, by the way, no CEO should make 320 times as much as the median worker (this figure is an average). We can be sure they don’t work 320 times as hard. (From the same article: Acuity Brands, an industrial technology company, paid its CEO, Neil M. Ashe, $21 million last year, or 2,316 times the median employee’s pay. An Acuity spokeswoman said the company’s pay program “is very well aligned with our shareholders’ interests.” And he works really really really really (etc.) hard? In 1989, the average was “only” 61-to-1.)

The more economically equal a society is, the healthier it is my many measures as reported in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by  Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

A maximum wage (taxes) can help achieve this.

RootsAction.org says we are currently in the longest period without a minimum wage increase since Congress established the federal minimum wage in 1938.

Mike Nesmith writing in Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff (excellent book but, for the Monkees-curious, very little about the other 3 in the single, Monkees-era chapter):

“I have talked to friends who have become Masters of the Universe and made billions of dollars, and they all have the same two concerns in common. The first is that they feel as if, in some unexplainable way, their wealth and success is a fluke, like hitting the lottery. Second, they fear it will all suddenly vanish and leave them wretched and homeless, living under a freeway overpass.”

Mark conjecture: the ever-reaching Koch brothers, the two very rich fellows (one died in 2019) who keep seeking political power and further wealth through influencing legislation and so forth actually believe they are not rich or powerful enough.

Capitalist insecurity.

Greed as based in fear.

Many of these billionaires will engage in philanthropy, but just making them pay significant taxes is better than their making their strings-attached philanthropy. Naturally, they want to steer how their money is used and may even leverage the philanthropy to make even more money.

There’s is a site called Celebrity Net Worth which yields some fascinating results.

Somehow, they have Foo Fighter Dave Grohl’s worth at $320 000 000.

This is astounding when you compare it with the net worth of someone who’s been in the music business for 30 years longer than him, such as Pete Townshend who they have at $150 000 000. Pete also presumably made money by his 1960s and 1970s work, initially on vinyl, being re-released as CDs, whereas Grohl came into prominence, ca. 1995 (Nirvana drummer) without that “double dipping.”

Now maybe Dave is really good at investments and maybe Pete is not and/or maybe Pete gave a lot of money away, you never know, but it’s in Celebrity Net Worth’s interest to be as accurate as possible; otherwise, people would stop visiting their site.

I think it’s interesting what these “commies” have:

Joan Baez: $11 000 000

The late Pete Seeger: $5 000 000

Buffy Sainte-Marie: $3 000 000

Robert Fripp, writing liner notes in 2009 to an anniversary issue of King Crimson’s first album (he suggests keeping music as a hobby instead of trying to make a living by it):

What have I learnt in the subsequent 40 years [since 1969]?

1. The inexpressible benevolence of the Creative Impulse.
2. The inexhaustible human capacity for lying, theft, corruption,
   cruelty, irresponsibility, exploitation, evasion, self-deception, and
   hypocrisy; and that’s only the music industry.
3. [and so forth]

He’s worth $10 000 000.

———=———

Anyone to Board this Metaphysical Choo-Choo? — Woo-Woo!

As far as channeling is concerned, the only channeling I really like is Jane Roberts’ (1929–1984) “Seth.” In my opinion, other channeling barely holds a candle to her work.

This material was popular in “New Age” circles in the 1970s and is now largely forgotten or overlooked. Richard “J. L. Seagull” Bach, singer Phoebe Snow, and, I understand, Jim Henson were fans. So was main Modern Lover Jonathan Richman. Apparently so is Bill Mumy. In fact, I learned of Jane in 1976 when, in a radio interview, Phoebe Snow mentioned Jane’s Seth books and said the books provide really good answers. I think she is right.

Fans of Deepak Chopra may know that he said this: “The Seth books … [are] useful to all explorers of consciousness.”

I believe Wayne Dyer drew on the books.

And Marianne Williamson, who ran among the field of Democrats in the 2020 presidential primary for the job Joe Biden got, said, “{Seth] remains a constant source of knowledge and inspiration in my life.”

Though this cannot be taken as an endorsement, all of Jane’s papers reside in a collection at Yale University; these arrangements were made by Tam Mossman, her editor at Prentice Hall who was a Yale graduate.

Seth described himself as “an energy essence personality no longer focused in physical reality.” When he was once so focused, he says he lived a number of lives on earth.

There are at least 30 books total and I would like to present some points from them. But there is really no thumbnailing all of that material.

(The procedure was Jane would go into trance and her husband, Rob, would write down what Seth had to say. Initially, they used a Ouija board that they had borrowed as an experiment. They did not set out as “true believers” in such things, and they got gibberish at first try; when they had used the board over several sessions, getting brief answers, Jane began to hear the answers in her head to the questions they posed. She decided to speak the answers. Later, in an informal class setting in their apartment, Seth would interact with Jane’s students, as well as come to dictate entire books for Rob to write down.)

Jane speaking for Seth in her class, ca. 1974:

Battling Fundamentalisms

From Jane/Seth’s The Magical Approach, Session Fourteen, September 29, 1980:

“If you can have reason without faith [dogmatic, materialist science], then indeed, for example, you will see that there can be faith without reason [religious fundamentalism]. When human experience becomes shrunken in such a fashion — compressed — then in a fashion it also explodes at both ends, you might say.

“You have atrocious acts committed, along with great heroism, but each are explosive, representing sudden releases of withheld energies that have in other ways been forbidden, and so man’s mass psyche expresses itself sometimes like explosive fireworks, simply because the release of pressure is necessary. [Gender inclusivity in Seth’s language was admittedly lacking. –Mark]

“Even your poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in its fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: ‘How is faith not real, then? We’ll change your laws with it. We’ll turn it into power — political power. What will you say then? We have been laughed at for so long. We will see who laughs now.’ [e.g., recent Supreme(ly Fascist) Court rulings –Mark, in opinion-mode]

“Fanaticism abounds, of course, because the human tendencies and experiences that have been denied by the mainline society erupt with explosive force, where the tendencies themselves must be accepted as characteristics of human experience. Iran is an example for the world, in explosive capsule form, complete with historical background and a modern political one. Modern psychology does not have a concept of the self to begin to explain such realities.”

I think we all well know what religious fundamentalism looks like. Here is the opposing “science fundamentalism” at work:

“Unfortunately, with the development of the scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened. As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality. What could not be proven in the laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

“Anyone who ‘experienced something that could not exist’ was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged.…”

Now when Seth mentions faith relative to reason, he is not referring to, say, the Apostles Creed, or, say, the notion of your individuality melting into a Nirvana (Seth wisecracked that with the notion of heaven, at least you get to keep your individuality), or (insert conventional religious idea that comes to your mind here).

He is referring, for instance, to not immediately dismissing a young child who, say, speaks of a past life such as the daughter of a woman I once knew who asked her mother, “Do you remember when I used to do this for you?” Or the child Leslie Kean (a Seth fan) wrote about in Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife who pointed to a photo in a book on Hollywood and said, “That’s me and George; we made a picture together!” and then went on to describe a life where he didn’t act that much but was instead a Hollywood agent, describing the office he then had and so forth.

Why not at least consider taking such a child at h/her word? Especially since there have been many such stories down through history and across cultures.

Or not immediately dismissing a person who had a near-death experience writing off what they experienced as merely the hallucinations of a dying brain, for, after all, post-experience, they no longer fear death. For mere hallucinations, what power!

For those who argue that these people did not actually die because they came back, I hope, for consistency, they also don’t consider that a room before them is real until they have actually entered it.

The way to avoid either of the battling fundamentalisms is to try to harmoniously marry reason with intuition (results may vary) which, for me, Jane marvelously did and expressed with her Seth material.

Just Say Maybe?

“The psychedelic drugs alter the neurological inner workings, and therefore can give some slight glimpses into other realities.”

—Seth, The Early Sessions, Vol. 9, Session 426, August 5, 1968

DMT is an interesting psychedelic which occurs naturally in the body in minute quantities; when administered, a trip lasts only about 20 minutes but is very profound.

Rick Strassman, MD, wrote about it in DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences.

A quote from the book by an experiencer:

“One of our volunteers likes to say ‘You can still be an atheist until [a dose of] 0.4 mg/kg of DMT.’”

Compare what a woman experiencer he quotes (below) says about her cells with this Seth quote:

”Your particular society has set up such an artificial division between intuitional and intellectual knowledge that only the intellectually apparent is given credence. With all of their dire faults and distortions, religions have at least kept alive the idea of unseen, valid worlds [distorted as heavens and hells –Mark], and given some affirmation to concepts that are literally known by the cells.”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, Session 691

‘There was a movement of color. The colors were words. I heard what the colors were saying to me. I was trying to look out, but they were saying, “Go in.” I was looking for God outside. They said, “God is in every cell of your body.” And I was feeling it, totally open to it, and l kept opening to it more, and I just took it in. The colors kept telling me things, but they were telling me things so I not only heard what I was seeing, but also felt it in my cells. I say “felt,” but it was like no other “felt,” more like a knowing that was happening in my cells. That God is in everything and that we are all connected, and that God dances in every cell of life, and that every cell of life dances in God….’

Seth’s term for God is All That Is which he described as a primary pyramid energy gestalt.

(I regard “The Creation” as God’s ineffable experience though Seth/Jane Roberts made an attempt to explain such things in the two volumes of Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment.)

Seth said:

‘I have said before, that you [who accept such ideas as what he presents –Mark] are the “black sheep of the Universe,” because you no longer blame gods nor demons nor circumstances for those effects in your life that you do not like; nor bow down to gods, devils or circumstances in praise of those good conditions that you have yourselves created. That therefore, you will become conscious cocreators with an All That Is that has little to do with the puny concepts in which God has been entrapped for centuries, as far as your religion and myths are concerned. For those myths have also entrapped you who believed in them.’

From Conversations with Seth by Sue Watkins (who attended many of Jane’s classes as did artist George Rhoads), Vol. 2, p.340 of original ed. /class session of 03/26/74.

“All religions are distortive. For that matter much of your science is distortive [in part, because it hews so closely to materialism –Mark]. Both arrive at approximations, at best, of reality.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Early Sessions, Vol 1, Session 34, March 11, 1964

“…the deepest truths cannot be physically proven.” [which is where a modicum of faith comes in –Mark]

—Seth/Jane Roberts, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol 1, Session 885, October 24, 1979

A note on atheism from an atheist:

“As most atheistic ideologies are based in the mere denial of God’s existence, I would like to stress that no philosophy can be justifiably upheld without possessing some underlying logic through which to substantiate its basic principles.

“Without such a logic, what is referred to as a philosophy is really nothing more than just another groundless belief system, founded in emotion rather than reason. As I see it, this is the essential problem faced by today’s atheist movement. Rather than possessing an inherent wisdom of its own, the atheist movement relies on the logical shortcomings of those faiths it seeks to contest. And though it’s true that no religion has ever been able to defend its precepts with reason, no legitimate philosophy can stand on gain-say alone. The contradicting of one belief system does not validate the tenets of another. Establishing that something is not white, for instance, does not necessitate its being black.

“Analogously, finding fault in the convictions of every world religion does not constitute proof that there is no God. Consequently, if we are ever to advance a viable atheism, it must possess its own rationale, its own logical foundation, something I believe this new science of ‘biotheology’ finally provides.”

From The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God by Matthew Alper, 2006

Where I part ways with Alper is he tries to explain experiences such as near death experiences strictly in terms of brain chemistry — materialism.

“The physicists have their hands on the doorknob. If they paid more attention to their dreams, they would know what questions to ask.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 758, October 6, 1975 — now, nearly 50 years later, the door is perhaps open a crack or at least the knob is being twisted.

“The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 898, January 30, 1980

Merrily, merrily…

“…dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’ s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain c[an] not handle in ordinary waking terms.”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 794

Seth suggests trying to become lucid when dreaming, i.e., aware in a dream that you are dreaming. Difficult for perhaps most people, including me with only a success or two years ago.

A limit to Artificial Intelligence?

“Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses.”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfilment, Vol. 1, Session 898, January 30, 1980

“…even electrons, for example, dream. Dreaming touches upon both microscopic and macroscopic events, or realities, and is not simply a human characteristic, appropriately appearing within your own range or within your own species. It is instead one area of subjective experience that is everywhere prevailing within the universe.

“As I have mentioned many times, animals then dream, as do plants, insects, and all forms of life. All molecular constructions exhibit that certain kind of introspective activity, as if the inner working of some giant computer was intimately in touch not only with its own programming and the probabilities connected with it, but with a deep psychological awareness of the activities of the electrons and various visible and invisible particles that form its own physical construction.”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfilment, Vol. 2, Session 935, August 13, 1981

Author and cognitive science professor Donald Hoffman happens to agree with Seth that matter arises from consciousness and not the other way around, and so consciousness does not depend on material form which then makes possible existence after death. Hoffman’s hand — and there are some others like him — is on the doorknob and he’s at least begun twisting…

“Birth is much more of a shock than death. Sometimes when you die you do not realize it, but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition. So there is no need to fear death. And I, who have died more times than I care to tell, write this book to tell you so.”

—Seth, Seth Speaks, Session 513, February 5, 1970

Jane’s husband, Rob, asked Seth if Jane had not been available to speak for Seth, then what?

“There is no one else presently alive in your system with whom I had any great rapport in the past, except yourselves. Such a ‘Speaker’ would have received the information largely in the dream state, and written it in a series both of treatises and fictionalized narrative.”

—Seth, Seth Speaks, Chapter 20: Session 584, May 3, 1971

There several different episodes of Rod Serling‘s original Twilight Zone where the main character doesn’t realize s/he is dead. I am not insisting Seth is behind such fictionalized narrative, but he did speak a little of his “colleagues”…

Seth/Jane says the ultimate building blocks are units of consciousness and that many millions of these comprise just one atom. If this is the case, that might explain the apparently endless subnuclear zoo since there will be countless possible groupings of “CUs” to make up the endless subnuclear zoo.

“Of course they [units of consciousness] move faster than light. There are millions of them in one atom — many millions. Each of these units is aware of the reality of all others, and influences all others. In your terms these units can move forward or backward in time, but they can also move into thresholds of time with which you are not familiar.”

—Seth, The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 1, Session 682, February 13, 1974

You know how, in order for things to “add up,” there has to be more hypothetical dark matter in the universe than regular matter? It’s like there has to be more “fairy dust” than regular dust!

Seth/Jane suggests that the telescopic observations upon which this idea is based amount to illusion:

“As their instruments reach further into the universe [at present, our latest gadget is the new James Webb Space Telescope –Mark] they will ‘see,’ and I suggest that you put the word see into quotes, they will ‘see’ further and further but they will automatically subconsciously transform what they apparently see into the camouflage pattern with which they are familiar.

“They will be and they are prisoners of their own tools. More galaxies will seemingly be discovered, more mysterious radio stars will be perceived, until the scientists realize that something is desperately wrong. [The wrongness, in my opinion has been “papered over” with the notion that there must be dark matter which we cannot see nor so far find, and that there must be far more of it than regular matter to make things “add up.” Science’s fudge factor. –Mark] Instruments designed to measure the vibrations with which scientists are familiar will be designed and redesigned. All sorts, finally, of seemingly impossible phenomena will be discovered with these instruments. The instruments will be designed to catch certain camouflages and since they are expertly thought out they will perform their function.

“I do not want to get too involved. However, by certain means the instruments will themselves transform data from terms that you cannot understand into terms that you can understand. Scientists do this all the time. However, what this involves is a watering down of data, a simplification that distorts all out of shape, [so] the original is hardly discernible when you are done. You are destroying the meaning in the translation.

“The instruments themselves do this transforming, transforming say the idea of time or light years into sound patterns, radio waves and such. You lose too much in this process. What you get is so distorted that you have absolutely no near perception of the original….”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, The Early Sessions, Vol. 1, Session 19, January 27, 1964

“There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet [entirely lost to us –Mark] that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of stars — people who even foresaw ‘later’ global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who journeyed to the moon, and who brought back data quite as ‘scientific’ and pertinent. There were those who understood the ‘origin’ of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships. Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated in journeys not only through time but through space.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 1, Session 702, June 10, 1974

If you can believe the late Malidoma Patrice Some’ of Burkina Faso in Africa, as I do, there are people now on the planet who can do these things such as the elders of his village. I learned of him several years ago through Jeanne Denney who met him. My brother saw him speak in Minneapolis at the Continuum Center there. I am planning to discuss his remarkable recountings in a future post.

Further assertion in line with Seth’s statement above:

‘There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. Species have come and gone of which you have no knowledge.’

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 11, Session 796, March 7, 1977

And:

“I said that your conventional geological ages were faulty, along with your theories of the age of the earth, for it is far older than is supposed. Obviously it has changed geographically—that you know. There were vast civilizations, however, where now there is only the endless expanse of the ocean waves, and ruins that most likely will never be discovered, for they are obliterated in the very life of the planet itself.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Personal Sessions, Vol. 4, November 14, 1977

Seth points out that another avenue that does not yield truly useful data is experimentation on animals. As one would no doubt not experiment on a pet, any other animal deserves the same respect.

He says such experiments are but a step away from experimenting on humans such as what the Nazi doctors did to Jews or what U.S. white doctors did to blacks.

“Your justification may be that people have souls and animals do not, or that the quality of life is less in the animals, but regardless of those arguments this is fanaticism — and the quality of human life itself suffers as a result, for those who sacrifice any kind of life along the way lose some respect for all life, human life included. The ends do not justify the means (spoken all very emphatically).”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 850, May 2, 1979

Seth has a lot to say about health, something our institutions and medical schools at best struggle with fully understanding.

Beliefs play a large role in health; take the placebo effect, for instance.

Limiting beliefs and “pessimisms” interfere with the natural state of the body which he insists is one of health.

 “An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner. As long as the illness continues the problem remains unsolved, and a vicious circle is maintained because of this unwholesome balance. The sufferer focuses upon the illness, therefore avoiding his task of [addressing] the [root] problem.”

—Seth, The Early Sessions, Vol. 4, Session 159, June 2, 1965

Symptoms are symbols of the inner problem. Here Seth gives an example:

“The heart is often described as a pump. With the latest developments in medical technology, there are all kinds of heart operations that can be performed, even the use of heart transplants. In many cases, even when hearts are repaired through medical technology, the same trouble reoccurs at a later date, or the patient recovers only to fall prey to a different, nearly fatal or fatal, disease. This is not always the case, by any means, but when such a person does recover fully, and maintains good health, it is because beliefs, attitudes, and feelings have changed for the better, and because the person ‘has a heart’ again, in other words, because the patient himself has regained the will to live.

[…]

“Many people who have heart trouble feel that they have ‘lost the heart’ for life. They may feel broken-hearted for any of many reasons. They may feel heartless, or imagine themselves to be so cold-hearted that they punish themselves literally by trying to lose their heart.

“With many people having such difficulties, the addition of love in the environment may work far better than any heart operation. A new pet given to a bereaved individual has saved more people from needing heart operations than any physician. In other words, ‘a love transplant’ in the environment may work far better overall than a heart-transplant operation, or a bypass, or whatever; in such ways the heart is allowed to heal itself.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Way Toward Health, Session of March 23, 1984

This woman had a near-death experience due to cancer. Her organs were shutting down, she was dying, but she “came back,” realizing the true cause of her cancer:

Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer to Near Death to True Healing by Anita Moorjani.

There is a doctor in Taiwan who has helped many people resolve their health issues essentially by counseling them along these lines, and, in so doing, this has resulted in something of a “Seth community” there. The proof of the pudding is seen when people get well from significant health issues using these ideas.

He wrote these books:

The Secret to Healing Cancer: A Seth Companion Book

and

Spiritual Prescriptions For Healing 10 Diseases and Challenges ( A Seth Companion Book) by Dr. Tien-Sheng Hsu.

Seth asserts one has deadly viruses in one’s body all the time and viruses are only “activated” through negative beliefs or “pessimisms.”

“Once again, then, ideas of the most optimistic nature are the biologically pertinent ones.”

–Seth, Session 06\27/84 for The Way Toward Health

I myself once realized the reason I had a cold, and, once I did, the symptoms all vanished in mere minutes, a minor miracle.

“‘Miraculous’ healings are simply instances of nature unhampered.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 2, Session 708 September 30, 1974

(Sometimes, per Seth, a cold is simply the immune system conducting a “fire drill.”)

Perhaps the books, all told, are about as woo-woo as you can get relative to the culture at large:

“At a conscious level, of course, neither of you [Jane nor her husband Rob] realized, or wanted to realize, the kind of complete repeal and overhaul that was implied by our sessions, and for some years you managed to hold many official views of reality along with the newer concepts, not ready to understand that an entire new way of thinking was involved, a new relationship of the individual with reality. So you tried out some new methods piecemeal, here and there, with good-enough results.

“Of course, an entire reorientation (spoken with emphasis) is instead implied…”

–Seth/Jane Roberts, The Magical Approach, AUGUST 18, 1980

If you read this far, thank you for indulging me!

The End.

Next week (subject to change): More and Further Observations and Thinkings, Guest Activist Maria Morales, Difficult People, Luv

Boilerplate: As part of my community project as Racine Writer in Residence, I hereby invite Racine-area people to send me prose or poems of 250 words or less for me to consider for inclusion in my posts as a “guest appearance.” I don’t know as I write this if this will cause a flood of responses or hardly any responses at all. If a “flood,” I will obviously have to pick and choose. If you want, also send a photo and a very short “bio.” You will retain the copyright for the material you submit. Send to m.mk at att.net with “Racine WiR” in the subject line. Thank you.