“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In Darwinian and Freudian terms, certainly later your joint and private pursuits literally made no sense, nor did they conform to any organized religious framework. Many of your difficulties came as your own natural impulses and natural inclinations conflicted with both Darwinian and Freudian concepts.

(12:01.) You have learned much, but until lately you always interpreted your position in the light of Darwinian and Freudian concepts. You want the books to sell well. That is natural. Your natures however are not particularly competitive. There is no reason to feel that you should (underlined three times) “be out there selling books.” You naturally both concentrate on ideas. Left alone, that concentration will naturally seek expression, amplification, and might result in, say, if you wanted it, some tours. But many of your ideas there are your attempts to bring your work into Darwinian terms.

The theory, then, is a way of organizing experience, a suggestive hypothesis. It is indeed no more than a point of view. It has colored man’s societies and cultures since its inception. It has dominated economical systems. In that regard, for example, James was quite correct: certain religious societies interpreted the theme so that it read “evolution of the soul”; but there is no soul in Darwinian theory and hereditary, and certainly none in the environment.

Suggestion not only impels toward action, but causes you to interpret action in a given manner. In strict Darwinian terms, man and animal alike had to be turned aggressively outward in the most competitive of physical ways. A new achievement on the part of a species, or any mutation occurred, occurred as the direct result of personal experience—and of course no information was available otherwise.

[...] I mentioned that modern psychology actually short-changed you, trying to fit itself into Darwinian beliefs. Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present. [...]

[...] The ordinary person, for example, in the western world cannot relate to a Darwinian past in that same fashion, and psychology robs him of any personal extension in the future after death, so in practical life most modern people have freedom of extension in space but less in time. [...]

[...] “Seth’s been telling us to be alert for negative Freudian and Darwinian beliefs — and suddenly I’m surrounded by my own. [...]

[...] If any of you do (underlined) still believe in the Freudian or Darwinian selves, then you will be leery about impulses to examine your own consciousness, afraid of what murderous debris might be uncovered. [...]

[...] The Freudian, Darwinian dictates quite emphatically degrade man’s capacity for “greatness,” for heroic action in those terms, and greatly devalue the entire meaning connected with an individual self. [...]

[...] Those are the ideas you are combating—not simply Freudian or Darwinian concepts from your lifetimes, but the accumulated misinformation from that historic past. [...]

I am, again, not telling you to be blind to physical events, but to realize that the news media, and your organizations, are not giving you an “objective” view of the world, but a view compounded and composed by Freudian and Darwinian beliefs. [...]

[...] The world is seen as a patient, sick in body, insane of mind, a thing that needs treatment, a Freudian and Darwinian monster. [...]

[...] But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and with the belief, then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.

[...] Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. [...]

As long as you believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for your actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then you cannot consciously understand your own creativity, or play the role in the universe that you are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. [...]

[...] The businessman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his ideal of surviving in a competitive world — he suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.

(Long pause at 9:02.) The Sinful Self shows itself in a period of transition from its religious to scientific format in science fiction or fantasy in particular, where you can almost trace the translation of religion’s self, tainted by original sin, to the Darwinian and Freudian concepts of the flawed self, bound to destruction one way or another, propelled by the unbridled unconscious or evolutionary defect. [...]

(Long pause at 9:37.) That idealism, however, ran smack into the dark clouds of Freudian and Darwinian thought. [...]

(Pause, then forcefully:) I am trying to temper my statements here, but your psychology of the past 50 years has helped create insanities by trying to reduce the great individual thrust of life that lies within each person, to a generalized mass of chaotic impulses and chemicals — a mixture, again, of Freudian and Darwinian thought, misapplied.

Noises outside the bedroom, of neighborhood activity, sometimes add to this, making him think he should be out in the world in a more gregarious, competitive manner, so he feels more isolated from other people and the community also at such times, as a result of the Darwinian concepts mentioned in our last session. [...]

Rob and I grew up in the world of Freudian and Darwinian concepts too, of course. [...]

[...] Partially it was the belief that women were more vulnerable, and the social conditions—Darwinian and Freudian concepts—that led him to accept that position, and all the material I have given fits in here. [...]

(Pause.) There has been great discussion in past years about the survival of the fittest, in Darwinian terms,⁴ but little emphasis is placed upon the quality of life, or of survival itself; or in human terms, [there has been] little probing into the question of what makes life worthwhile. [...]

[...] If Christendom saw man as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see him as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal — a survival, however, without meaning. [...]

[...] This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in your terms: But such decisions are often semiconscious (intently). It might be that those individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes — but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.

[...] Those urges are creative even when, as a designer, he goes against his own Darwinian concepts that there is no conscious plan involved in the design of his world.