Session 840-1 (p. 181-91) said:
You could not live without viruses, nor could your biological reality as you know it now exist.
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. These – and I am putting it as simply as possible – take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. 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. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladonna can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.
The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.
The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual value as a social member is severely weakened.
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]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. 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.
I told you that viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases – and certainly, scientifically inoculations seem to work: People in your time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons – and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when those societies encountered “civilized views.”
If you call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then you have taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of your scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he dies of cancer as a result of his negative beliefs.
What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” – meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social. Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but you are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”
You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.
[…]
Now: I said, in book dictation, I believe, that the people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs – or words to that effect. I used words to that effect.
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 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 negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.
When you think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.
Your physical body 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. 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 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.
When the thought is thought, it is, say, broken down again to those components. Your thoughts have an emotional basis, also. The smallest cell within your body contributes to that emotional reality, and reacts instantly to your thoughts.
In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically, when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally, you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.
While I say all of this about thoughts and viruses, remember the context of the discussion, for new information and insights are always available to an individual from Framework 2, and the body does indeed send its own signals.
The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. How could their thoughts allow them to bring about their [bodily deaths]? Again, the question makes sense only if you do not realize that your thoughts are as physically a part of your body as viruses are.
I just checked (from the UK) and it works for me both embedded and following the link. I was concerned it would have been blocked before i had chance to view it! It was also my first time embedding on here so theres always the chance i had fluffed up..
