“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This little session is almost book dictation. I’m also presenting it because it shows how an event on one day of our lives—a television program—influenced Jane’s delivery of one session of the Seth material. Other factors are involved, of course, as they always must be, and I refer to one of those at the end of the session.

Now. (Pause, then quietly:) We have been trying to form some kind of a neurological bridge in order to convey some particularly pertinent material for our book. This is the cause of Ruburt’s sense of disorientation.

He did pick up our next chapter heading (six): “Genetic Heritage and Reincarnational Predilections,” and I am trying to give him this other material at different levels. Then later it will indeed be translated into suitable English sentences.

(9:42 P.M. Seth’s references to my facial changes while sleeping touched upon a subject Jane and I had meant to ask him about several times; she’d referred to it again today. My eye improvements had been “officially” verified by our optometrist, John Smith, on February 18. [See Note 1 for Session 901.] A few nights before that, Jane had awakened and turned on her table light, sitting up in bed to have a cigarette as she sometimes does. She’d noticed my expression as I lay sleeping on my back: “One of bliss, almost, though I don’t like the word, and it’s not the right one anyhow,” she told me the next morning. “But I’ve seen you sleeping before, and I knew the difference.

I now reminded Jane that John Smith had knocked on our back door at suppertime tonight. She exclaimed in surprise: She’d consciously forgotten that event, for she hadn’t seen John as I briefly talked with him on the back porch. He’d stopped by on his way home to give me my old lenses, since he’d forgotten to do so at his office four days ago, when I’d had them replaced in my favorite old frames by the new, weaker lenses. I told Jane I felt that regardless of John’s evocative visit Seth would have mentioned my eye phenomena tonight, given his subject matter for the session. And yet, I added, because of the very nature of the Seth material, I’m also bound to think that beneath that simplified explanation there are “deeper” connections—in which the television program, her reactions to it, John’s appearance, and tonight’s session are all related. Jane agreed.)

1. Genes are elemental units arranged along the threadlike chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell, and transmit hereditary characteristics to following generations of animals and plants. The gene is primarily made up of protein and a twisted double strand or helix of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. Each gene occurs at a specific location on a chromosome. We humans, for instance, have 46 chromosomes and an estimated 100,000 genes in each cell, and our genes provide the blueprints for the synthesis of some 50,000 proteins. I’m sure that our wonder at the vast organization of nature will continue to grow as our scientists plunge ever deeper into the complexities of genetic research. And what about the philosophical questions involving free will in all of this? Just how much real freedom do we have, if all is programmed by our genetic heritage? (I ask the question aside from the old, still-extant arguments within philosophy, psychology, and religion over whether free will has ever existed—or does—in any context. In addition, now we also have many newer questions about inherited genetic equality and/or inequality!)

For that matter, one can ask the same questions about our supposed reincarnational heritage: Just how much free will does that concept leave us? Are we as fated to dance to unknown and unrealized nonphysical reincarnational events, tendencies, and goals, as we are to the physical, genetic ones—that is, do the two operate together? How immutable, or resistant to change, are those two endowments, and what parts of either one can we turn off if we choose to? Will the dissection of a gene, down even to its atomic components, ever yield reincarnational clues? In Mass Events Seth told us: “Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around, and the about-to-be-born infant is the agency that adds new material through the chromosomal structure.” In Chapter 4, see Session 827 for March 13, 1978.