Dictation: Chapter Seven: “The Living Flesh.”
Give us a moment... Often individuals go overboard, forgetting that ideas have their own vitality. Such people make divisions where basically there are none. They consider ideas as completely mental properties, separate from their concept of the body. They think ideas reside in their heads. Who, for example, imagines that an idea is alive in his elbow, or knee, or toe?
Generally, people believe that ideas have little to do with the living flesh. The flesh seems physical and ideas do not. Those given to love of the intellect often make an unnecessary separation between the world of concepts and that of the flesh.
While it is true that the body is the living materialization of idea, it is also true that these ideas form an active, responsive, alive body. The body is not just a tool to be used. It is not just a vehicle for the spirit. It is the spirit in flesh. You impose your ideas upon it and largely affect its health and well-being through your conscious beliefs. But the body is composed of living, responding atoms and molecules. These have their own consciousness alive in matter, their drive to exist and to be within the framework of their own nature. They compose the cells, and these combine to form the organs. The organs possess the combined consciousness of each of the cells within them, and in their way the organs sense their own identity.
They have a purpose – that function they provide within the organism as a whole. This cooperation of consciousness continues so that you have a body consciousness that is vital, that strives to maintain its own equilibrium and health.
The stuff of the body should not be considered as some metaphysical result, then, but as a living gestalt of responsive flesh. Your body is composed of other living entities, in other words. Though you organize this living material it has its own right to fulfillment and existence. You are not a soul encased in inert clay.
The “house of clay” does not immediately deteriorate when you leave it. It disintegrates at its own rate. It is no longer organized by your own domain. The life of its atoms and molecules and cells is translated into other living natural forms. Your perception is merely that which you are aware of. Even the atoms and molecules have their own fine vision and appreciate their environment in their own way. The same power that moves your mind forms your body.
There is no difference between the energy that shapes your ideas and the energy that grows a flower, or that heals your finger if you burn it. The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms – some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.
Physical existence is valualble for many reasons, one being that the flesh is so responsive to thought and yet so resiliant. There are built-in guidelines so that the body consciousness itself, while mirroring your negative images at times, will also automatically struggle against them.
You must remember that you dwell always in a natural framework – which means that your thoughts themselves are as natural, say, as the locks of your hair. In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy, I will compare your thoughts with viruses, 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. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these, knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. 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.
So viruses can be beneficial or deadly according to the condition, state, and needs of the body at any given time. It is known that one disease can often cure another, sometimes, left alone, an individual will go from a serious disease through a series of less severe ones that are seemingly unrelated to the original problem.
Now in the context of usual Western learning, and with the introduction of modern drugs, you are in somewhat of a quandary. The body knows how to handle “natural” drugs coming directly from the earth – whether ground or boiled, minced or steamed. A large variety of “manufactured” drugs offer an unfamiliarity to the body's innate structure, which can lead to strong defense mechanisms. These are often aimed directly against the drug instead of the disease itself. Such a situation means that you must then use another drug to counteract the one just given.
I am not suggesting that you not visit doctors or not take drugs of that nature, as long as you believe in the structure of medical discipline that the Western world has evolved. Your bodies have been conditioned to it through the use of such medications since birth. There are many casualties, but this is still a system that you have chosen and your ideas still form your reality. No one dies who has not made the decision to do so – and no disease is accepted blindly. Put simply, your thoughts can be regarded as invisible viruses, carriers, sparks setting off reactions not only within the body but the entire physical system as you know it.
Your thoughts are as natural as the cells within your body, and as real. They interact with one another as viruses do. While you are in this reality there is no division between the mental, the spiritual, and the physical. If you think there is, then you do not sufficiently understand the spirituality of the flesh or the physical reality of your thought.
As stated, thoughts are as natural as any portion of the body. They are as much a part of nature as feelings are, but if you set up an arbitrary division – considering thoughts mental as distinguished from the physical – then your body may give a truer reflection of your being than your thoughts do.
In the body's spontaneous functioning you see the easy mobility of the soul, the “going with that which I am,” which is an indication of the soul's inner freedom and yet innate sense of direction. All portions of the body's reality are versions in flesh of the soul's reality, even as all segments of the exterior universe mirror an internal one. The latter is as alive and natural and changing as the exterior world. Physical phenomena is only a portion of what nature is, and all realities are natural.
In your terms, probabilities are extensions and variations on the growth principle that is quiet obvious in your daily reality. Such growth is a natural manifestation flourishing within your particular area of actuality, observable to your senses. Again, other entirely natural manifestations of that principle exist. Some can only be glimpsed in distorted form because of other “natural” conditions that you cannot perceive. Probabilities involve you with a rich psychological growth and development, present but not observable in your “home ground”. Any kind of existence happens within the context of nature, and nature includes the soul. Your definition of nature has simply been too limiting.
It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. It is natural for you to have probable selves as well as reincarnational existences.
When you consider ideas as mental and apart from nature, then you feel separated from nature itself. When you imagin a life after death as unnatural or supernatural then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered. You must try to understand that there are different kinds of nature within Nature. Your physical life – your human nature – is, in your terms, dependent upon a time when you were not. You must realize that not being in that connotation is quite as natural as physical being. Your existence before and after death is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.
Session 632, January 13, 1973, 9:00 PM Monday
As most of you know, the atoms that compose your cells, as well as the cells themselves, constantly die and are replaced. The stuff of the internal organs changes and yet they always retain their form. Their identity is intact.
So is your own identity secure in the midst of all these births and deaths of which your conscious self is unaware. The memory of all of its parts have been and are being continually replaced.
As your cells have their own memories, so the conscious mind has a more overt kind of memory. Your conscious thoughts act as triggers, bringing both kinds of memory into activation. Within your physical being then each joyful, expanding, traumatic and tragic “past” events lies indelibly written. In your terms this is your working material, the memory of your physical being since the time of its conception in corporeal form. There are [in your memory] the most complex organizations and associative frameworks, that exist both in the depths of your cellular structure and in the highest reaches of your conscious activity.
Earlier I compared your thoughts to viruses. Think of them now as living electromagnetic cells, differing from the physical cells in your body only in the nature of their materialization. Your thoughts direct the overall functioning of your body's cells, even though you do not consciously know how those cells operate. That work is unconscious.
Each physical cell is in its way a miniature brain, with memory of all of its personal experiences and of its relationship with other cells, and with the body as a whole. In your terms this means that each cell operates with an innate picture of the body's entire history – past, present, and future.
Now this picture is ever-changing and mobile. An alteration in just one cell is instantly noted by the body consciousness (the combined consciousness of the cells), and the future effect perceived. This information is used together with all other data from the body, and a prediction made.
This body prediction is then assessed, and on more levels than it is possible for me to explain. Briefly, the picture is “shown” in the invisible arena where flesh and spirit meet. This arena is not a place, of course, but an inner state of gestalt consciousness. The state is brought about through certain interactions that occur deep within the body. Magnetic structures are formed. They are created on a physical level through certain activations of the nerves in which the normal patters are jumped, so to speak, and images are formed. The nerves and the cellular structures at their tips take pictures. These are all assembled and used to form the larger picture of the body's condition.
These are not images as you think of them but highly coded information, electromagnetically imprinted, that would not appear as images to the physical eye. In any case they cannot be perceived except by the body. But this procedure is so far superior to anything that you know that the body, therefore, actually takes precognitive pictures of its future condition – as if the body situation at the time were projected into the future.
This predictive picture is then set against two models. First it is checked against the body's ideal standard of health in its individual case – its own greatest fulfillment. Then it is checked against the image of the body sent to it by the conscious self. Correlations are made instantaneously. In an organizational framework that would certainly be envied by the most advanced technological concern, communications spring back and forth with great rapidity. The body makes whatever changes are necessary in order to bring the two images in line with the present corporeal condition.
There is a built-in equilibrium to some extent. The body is so responsive to conscious thought that it has its own innate system of self-preservation and tis own guiding image of fulfillment.
Say that at the age of four you were severely injured. An accident took place at 3:20 in the afternoon. It was snowing. Your mother was roasting a turkey. Imagine that you burned a hand severely. Though all of the tissue in that hand has often been completely replaced by the time you are twenty-seven, for example, the identity within each of those present cells remembers that injury.
There were countless other events that happened to you on different afternoons at the same hour, both before and after that one. The cells within your hand contain within themselves memories your conscious mind would be dazzled to behold. Yet remember that the cells in your twenty-seven-year-old hand are in no physical way the same cells that experienced any of those events. In some underground of sensation, however, the buried evidences of stimuli and reaction experienced during those numberless “past” afternoons still exist. Some of those memories will certainly be played back, to affect what you think of as your current experience at twenty-seven. Your conscious thoughts and habits regulate which of them will intermix into the maelstrom of the present.
You consciously give the signals for reaction. It is not the other way around. Past events do not intrude in this manner unless they are beckoned by the conscious expectations and thoughts that exist within your mind. Those unconscious memories will be activated according to your current beliefs. You will be replenished and renewed as your thoughts motivate joyful body sensations and physical events, or you will be depressed as you bring into your awareness unpleasant past body happenings.
At times of course both can be highly beneficial. A conscious realization of danger, for example, will call up all information dealing with similar situations, so that the body can deal with it at once from the vast bank of its living memory. But constant unpleasant thoughts put the body into a state of turmoil that is “unrealistic”, and, in turn, force it to reactivate such old patterns.
The living flesh is quite aware of certain facts that escape you on a conscious level. It knows it dies and is reborn constantly, and yet retains itself. I use the terms “dies” and “is reborn” because you make sense of them, but the body does not. The body, while being always itself, comes and goes. It does not feel less or diminished when a cell dies, for it is also in the process of forming a new one.
For a moment, think of your body as one large cell in the moment of its being. You, the larger self, have many bodies, each turning into the other as one dies and is reborn; yet You maintain your identity and your memory even as the smallest cell in your present body does.
This is merely an analogy but it will explain your body's concept of itself; for as a whole it knows it “dies” as now its portions do, but is also aware of its “future” transformation. Within this framework it protects and maintains its own stability and survival.
At one level of your being there is a common ground where body consciousness merges with that higher consciousness from which your own identity springs. This is the ground of your being where soul and flesh meet, both in time and out of it.
Because you are conscious of being, you form your physical reality through conscious thought.
I am quite aware that I am repeating myself again and again when I make that statement, but you need to be reminded that you are not at the mercy of unconscious events. You have the body's innate wisdom behind you and it will always try to correct your errors.
These suggestions will appear in numberless ways – some quite physical to your way of thinking, and some through other means. The body may of itself begin to crave certain foods, for example, or fresh air or exercise. These are simple instances, and later we will be more specific.
You may have dreams urging you to move in such and such a direction, or pointing out areas in which corrections should be made. Often such dreams bring about behavior changes whether or not you remember them in the morning. You may request dreams in which proper direction is given, and you will receive them. If you ask on the one hand, however, and do not believe in the therapeutic nature of dreams on the other, you will short-circuit any such activity. In such a case you are not being honest with the contents of your conscious mind. Instead you are saying, “I will have a dream to help me, and yet I do not believe I can have such a dream.”
In all cases when you are concerned about your health, there is a choice of directions for you to follow. The living flesh is yours. It is the materialization of your soul, and through the body the soul will provide you with those answers you require. In the next chapter we will begin to discuss those methods that can be used to refresh and heal the body, and that will help you arouse from within the physical form those memories and experiences most to your advantage. For best results, you must remember that ideas are as alive as the cells within your hand.
End of chapter. That was a transitional chapter.
- pages 118-127, The Nature of Personal Reality, by Jane Roberts (A Seth Book)
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