It was the belief. It is far more subtle than most are aware of and far more tricky as well.
This excerpt might help the thinking.
Seth: "Now: each body is of course individual, and while there must be similarities in the ways bodies utilize substances, still there are differences—and sometimes the differences can be more than considerable. Not only in the case of a given substance in many bodies, for example, but any given body may utilize any given substance in quite diverse fashions, according to varying circumstances.
The dietary methods given in the book Ruburt read have indeed worked for many, and for the following reasons: as you suspected, a kind of conversion was attained. The people involved first of all had been told by doctors—medical doctors—that they themselves had no control over their own disease, that the symptoms could be lessened somewhat—PERHAPS—but that there was no hope for recovery.
They were frightened and angry, their condition such that they were often in constant pain. When they visited the author, however, he was optimistic and brusque. He said “You do indeed have control,” and his personal manner was such that he convinced them. Now that was all to the good. They were given hope and thrown back to a feeling of self-reliance.
Now, however, the story becomes trickier. The patients had various beliefs, of course, behind their conditions. Many felt unworthy. Because of this many were unable to express normal aggression. Some were frightened of the world, and so forth. The author gives such people a specific enemy, or evil: no more must they be battered with formless fears, but these become gathered together and focused into the dietary area. Unhealthy foods become the villain.
This means that there is nothing intrinsically intrinsically wrong with the person, which many of them have believed. THEY are good (as of course they are). The trouble is what they take into their system. Those who are cured are at a certain state when they approach the author, as mentioned earlier, feeling helpless after medical treatments that did not work—feeling that there is something wrong with them. They are in their own eyes “bad”—and in one way or another that kind of belief was behind the condition to begin with.
(4:13.) To that degree, the author offers them salvation: “You are good, but the food is bad.” The fasting is symbolic, as is the emphasis upon enemas and elimination, for these are meant to flush the impurities from your system.
You are as empty, symbolically, open and vacant, as a newborn child, ready now only to partake of God’s pure foods, determined to avoid technology’s poisonous effects. You are taking in goodness, then, and becoming better and better. You accept dietary limitations—say a limited environment of food—rather than the limitations earlier felt in motion. The exterior environment opens up. Oftentimes the previously withheld normal aggression now can be legitimately expressed—against the food companies, the technological environment, the medical profession, and so forth.
The cured person becomes a convert to a new way of life. When there are no cures, or patients do not respond, or they slide back into old ways, the doctor-author simply says they are not ready to take the steps necessary, or they have taken them half-heartedly. And many who are cured, of course, come down with other conditions if they have not succeeded in identifying their own fears sufficiently with the author’s.
The body is amazingly capable of turning what seem to be toxic substances into beneficial ones, and any body carries within it quite harmlessly all kinds of seemingly deadly viruses that in a healthy person ADD to overall body balance and health.
(Intently, and with humor:) I am somewhat familiar with food before canning and refrigeration, and there were maggots everywhere, and feces and dirt, and sanitation was largely unknown. So in certain terms God’s fruits and vegetables are not entirely pure in spiritual terms, as many food faddists imply.
All chemicals are natural. They come from what was already available to you—you cannot make a chemical except from substances or elements you already have. In certain terms, now, some natural diets of five centuries ago could kill you today, though they lacked any technologically produced chemicals.
YOU TELL YOUR BODY WHAT TO DO WITH THE FOOD YOU EAT—and when you are in a technological civilization, it is rather foolhardy to convince yourselves that your food is poisoned.
Such attitudes may be part of your methods of learning, to show you that technology should only go so far. Period. "
Roberts, Jane. The Personal Sessions: Book Five of the Deleted Seth Material, DELETED SESSION NOVEMBER 15, 1978 4:00 PM WEDNESDAY - by Jane Roberts © L. Davies Butts