“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All of this reminds me that lately the media have carried a number of stories detailing how medical science is not only trying hard to approach cures for scourges like cancer (in cancer’s case, possibly through the exploration and understanding of the role played in the cell nucleus by altered normal cells called oncogenes), but is already claiming to have narrowed down its search to specific genes that affect imponderables like behavior—depression, for example. Not only that, sociobiologists are advancing their very controversial ideas that much of human behavior has an ultimate genetic basis, which in turn influences cultural change, and so on.

Well, one may ask, if a so-called negative quality like depression has a genetic foundation, what about the genetics for a positive attribute like joy—or, even, something like reincarnation? (I haven’t come across anything in the media yet about either one of those.) If reincarnational and genetic systems are intermixed, then it could be said that even a person’s decision to ignore his or her reincarnational heritage was in itself genetically based—and it could be fun to explore the contradictory ramifications of such a state. What other wonders might our cells contain? While amusing myself I’m simplifying to a great degree: If traces of one’s “successive” lives are genetically embedded, sorting them out would be an enormous task.

“I’ve had several new experiences with altered states of consciousness,” she wrote in labored script, “and these are quite different than anything I’ve done before. For this reason they are difficult to classify….” Also, she’s indulged in long conversations with me—and on occasion with certain friends—when we apparently were present in out-of-body states. Related here are actions she thought she was participating in with me, say, yet when she “woke up,” she discovered we hadn’t done any of those things. She’s referred often to “gaps in my consciousness” while dozing. “I don’t know what I was doing in my chair,” she said at 11:05 A.M. yesterday; she’d fallen asleep after telling me she had to use the commode. “I don’t like the way the thyroid business is making me feel…. I feel like I’m in your way, or in life’s way….” She had certainly been depressed on that occasion, and I’d tried to cheer her up.