Seth on Botox. (Sort of.)

Seth,  03/02/76

Seth: Now: it may seem to most people that an exuberant, always-vital, energetic, healthy body would indeed be one of the greatest gifts of all--a body that never worried or showed signs of any disorder, a body that went ahead on its own, so to speak, propelled by feelings of strength and vigor.

This certainly sounds like a fine ideal. Yet I tell you that in such a body you would finally feel like a prisoner, for your moods and reflections, your feelings and your thoughts, would find no responsive mirror in your flesh.

You would wear a constant smile, and your blooming cheeks would often deny the heart's hard-earned knowledge.

It is natural and HEALTHY to yearn for a comfortable body if you are in health difficulties. The body, however, is NOT an assumed facade, but the physical materialization in your world of your inner being. All of nature is responsive, pliant, changing, each part connected with each other part.

It is quite natural, then, that during a lifetime you experience various assorted periods of temporary illness.

These will be caused by your beliefs and your feelings, but they will not be necessarily negative at all, but a demonstration of the body's responsiveness. It is not realistic to expect a life of unending, exuberant health, with no momentary lapses of any kind.

Such momentary lapses follow personal and cultural patterns. Some generations fall heir to certain fashionable diseases, for example. The body copes with inner and exterior reality, and performs a marvelous job of maintaining multitudinous balances.

Ideally, the body would always right itself after such lapses from exuberant health--but even those lapses often exercise that resiliency. Maintaining that resiliency, then, is the important issue. Many such lapses are exaggerated because of your beliefs, so that they are experienced in a more drastic form than necessary. GENERALLY drugs impede that resiliency.

Often your medical beliefs as a culture stabilize conditions that, left alone, would right themselves. As you know, this can apply for example to children being given eyeglasses. IN THE SITUATION IN WHICH YOU FIND YOURSELVES, however, eyeglasses become a more practical alternative because you do not possess the proper mental methods to offset the current belief system.

The mind may want to react. The individual may realize that his or her pace has been too fast, and so natural feelings bring about a lethargy of body, or a slight fever, or an indisposition--all quite natural, resilient activities. I do not want this ever to be interpreted to mean, a priori, and in conventional terms, that "suffering is good for the soul". A reliance and faith in the natural self, however, would be large enough to accept certain indispositions without fear, panic, or doubt.

With the best of intent most public health announcements shout the symptoms of critical diseases to the skies, so that the smallest of indispositions become the trigger for personal fear on the part of millions. Such announcements actually teach people to fear what might be happening within the body. There is a stress upon disease rather than health.

When such beliefs are shared by an entire society, then the slightest indisposition is instantly suspect.


© Laurel Butts