Seth on Sacred Cannibals... or how to lose weight

[Deb]

This is by far the strangest Seth story I've come across to date. Remember to thank your food.

"The cannibals," Seth was telling us, "in one way were far more dis­cerning, far more religious, and far more sacred in their attitude than many of you here in this room."

"Ulp" mumbled the enormous woman visiting class that November night in 1970.

"They ate, for example, both human beings and animals, but they did not eat indiscriminately; nor did they eat without a knowledge of what they did," Seth elaborated. "They realized that their life was a portion of all this life . . . they gave thanks to the body that they consumed; they hastened the spirit that had been in the body on its way with thanks . .. many of them, in their own environment, knew that those who were not eaten by them for example, other warriors would die of hunger in any case. They ate them, then, with thanksgiving and joy."

The woman, wedged firmly in her chair, was suddenly dripping with sweat. "UGH," she said aloud. The poor lady must have weighed 350 pounds; when she first arrived in class, Jane had gently directed her to the sturdy armchair by the kitchen door and with good reason. The old chair's legs were now sunk into the rug. How had we gotten onto the subject of eating things? A minute ago we'd been talking about the evolution of the dinosaurs...

"You, however, eat indiscriminately, with no thought of the living animal that you consume!" Seth was saying, rather pointedly in this woman's direction. "Now, as you consume the ani­mals, so one day will your physical body return to the earth and help form other animals. And portions of the atoms themselves that compose your body will run across the fields in Iowa a hundred years from now, changed . . . but remembering their backgrounds." Seth stared directly at the woman with his penetrating gaze.

"There is a sacrament here that you do not understand," he said, "and when you gobble down food indiscriminately, and when you do not give silent recognition to the fact that what you eat once lived, then you lose part of a cycle in which you rightly, as physical creatures, and as spiritual creatures, have a part."

"Oh-h-h-ggghh," the woman gurgled.

"Is this not true whether we eat meat or vegetables?" Arnold Pearson asked.

"It is, indeed," Seth answered.

"Then," Grant Sayles spoke up, "should people get a pleasure out of killing, like people do for sport, instead of killing for food?"

"In your terms and in the way you are asking the question, the answer is that no, they should not; and that they will have to deal with this," Seth replied.

"In what way will they have to deal with it?" Grant pursued.

"It is a lack of development, spiritual development, and so it will automatically lead them into trials that they will have to face not in terms of punishment, but in terms of understanding. The ignorance will cause them sorrow until they learn to rid themselves of it."

"This would be the same thing as if I went out and chopped down a tree for no reason at all," Grant stated.

"It is, indeed," Seth agreed. For a moment, Seth stared again at the woman, who was now sweating profusely, her eyes bulg­ing as she gasped for air.

"Well, I don't think it sounds like the cannibals were very religious," Florence Maclntyre remarked from the sofa. Florence, who had a weight problem of her own, was dwarfed by this woman tonight.

"You were never a cannibal!" Seth answered. "The cannibals knew this sacrament subconsciously [and] it was built around a religious ritual. Their rituals were as strict as they are in your church, and they were as religious as they followed them.

"They ate the brave and the strong. Now, some tribes ate the elders. When the old could not care for themselves, if they were very wise and brave men, then they had a dance around them, and this was known by all involved. Then they killed and ate the wise elders . . . Both as a method of ending their lives, in a quiet man­ner, for they killed them easily, when they were too old to run from jungle animals or from hunters or from warriors from other tribes; [and] so that the wisdom could become a part [of the tribe] ... In one way, immortality could be achieved, in that the elders would then feel that they were a part ... of the flesh and the blood of the tribe, and this was believed by all and not feared by the elders. The elders preferred it rather than to be banished and left the prey of animals or to die of starvation or slow death outside of the tribe."

The huge woman covered her face with her hands. "I need a drink of water," she groaned. Jane came out of trance just in time to see her guest heave herself up out of the chair and stagger to­ward the closet-sized kitchen.

"Uh" Jane said. "Well, I guess it's time for a break, unless somebody wants to fill me in on... "CRASH!!

The room shook with the sudden impact: glasses rattled on tables; Rob's paintings flapped in place against the wall. Willy, Jane's cat, shot wild-eyed out of the closet and scrabbled for the safety of the bathroom.

"Oh, my God!" Sally Benson wailed. "That woman's fainted dead away in there!" Joel Hess, who had some first-aid training, ran into the kitchen ahead of several others. The woman had indeed passed out, and was stuck good and tight in the tiny space between the refrigerator and stove. Her short, thick arms were caught up over her head. Her face was purple.

Joel grabbed a glass and filled it with cold water. "Here! Drink this! Drink this!" he yelled, waving it under the woman's nose.

"Joel, you jerk, she's out cold!" I pointed out. "Slap her wrists or something."

"That's not going to help her now!" someone said from behind me. "How are you going to get her out of there?"

"We'll just have to move the stove out," Joel offered dramatically.

The woman's eyelids fluttered. "Oh, sweet Jesus," she mumbled. She looked up at Joel, still standing there with the glass in his hand. "Get me out of here!" she wailed, panic pushing at her voice.

"Now, now, don't worry; it's okay, we'll help you," Joel soothed. He looked the situation up and down and made helpless gestures. There was hardly enough room in the kitchen for any one of us, let alone enough people to help her. I started to shake with re­pressed laughter. This was awful the poor woman must be utterly humiliated, as I certainly would have been, and here I was suffocating with stopped-up giggles.

I left the kitchen. Arnold Pearson replaced me, and there was a lot of grunting. Something ripped. The oven door banged open and slammed shut. Finally, the woman emerged into the living room and walked straight out the door, muttering something in passing about having to get home early.
We never saw her again, which isn't surprising. Jane explained that the woman had told her on the phone that afternoon that she wanted to come to class for some insights on how to lose weight.

"And Seth goes and talks about cannibals??" Jane groaned, rolling her eyes toward Heaven. We really felt like dogs the lady must have been devastated. Had Seth gone too far? Yet, his remarks on food and "indiscriminate" eating had sprung from our own conversation, and were certainly applicable to all of us. Obviously, they'd hit home for that woman and we sincerely hoped she would find some help through them. But from then on, whenever someone in class started complaining about a weight problem, we'd remember the lady who fainted in the kitchen over the carnivorous habits of the cannibals."

Chapter 17, Con­versations With Seth, Vol II by Susan Watkins