“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Still slowly at 8:59:) Other creatures have their own kinds of mental activity, however. They also have different kinds of immediate perceptions of reality. All species are united by their participation in emotional states, however. It is not just that all species of life have feeling, but that all participate in dimensions of emotional reality. It has been said that only men have a moral sense, that only men have free will—if indeed free will is possible at all. The word “moral” has endless connotations, of course. Yet animals have their own “morality,” their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. (Pause.) They have loving emotional relationships, complicated societies,³ and in a certain sense at least—an important one—they also have their arts and sciences. But those “arts and sciences” are not based upon reasoning, as you understand it.

—with great technical facility, regardless of family background, genetically speaking, and again, the reincarnational bank of characteristics accounts for such events. That inner reincarnational psychic structure is also responsible for triggering certain genetic messages while ignoring others, or for triggering certain combinations of genetic messages. In actuality, of course—say that I smiled—all time is simultaneous, and so all reincarnational lives occur at once.

You reason out your position. Otherwise your free will would have no meaning in a physical framework, for the number of choices available would be so multitudinous that you could not make up your mind to act within time. With all the opportunities of creativity, and with your own greater knowledge instantly available, you would be swamped by so many stimuli that you literally could not physically respond, and so your particular kinds of civilization and science and art could not have been accomplished—and regardless of their flaws they are magnificent accomplishments, unique products of the reasoning mind.

You have, however, become so specialized in its use, so prejudiced in its favor, that your tendency is to examine all other kinds of consciousness using the reasoning mind as the only yardstick by which to judge intelligent life. You are surrounded everywhere by other kinds of consciousness whose validity you have largely ignored, whose psychic brotherhood you have dismissed—kinds of consciousness in the animal kingdom particularly, that deal with a different kind of knowing, but who share with you the reality of keen emotional experience, and who are innately aware of biological and psychic values, but in ways that have escaped your prejudiced examination.

To some extent that emotional reality is also expressed at other levels—as your own is—in periods of dreaming, in which animals, like men, participate in a vast cooperative venture that helps to form the psychological atmosphere in which your lives must first of all exist.

(10:01 P.M. “Gee, I thought some of that was great while I was giving it, but now I can’t remember what it was,” Jane said as soon as Seth had gone. “But I feel better…. I think I got all kinds of goodies out of all proportion to time.”

“All creatures of whatever degree have their own appreciation of esthetics. Many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: the spider’s web, for example, or the beaver’s dam—and there are endless other examples. This is not ‘blind instinctive behavior’ at all, but the result of well-ordered spontaneous artistry.

“Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man likes to believe that this is so. Art is above all a natural characteristic. I try to straddle your definitions—but flowers, for example, in a fashion see themselves as their own artistic creations. They have an esthetic appreciation of their own colors—a different kind, of course, than your perception of color. But nature seeks to outdo itself in terms that are most basically artistic, even while those terms may also include quite utilitarian purposes. The natural man, then, is a natural artist. In a sense, painting is man’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his own reality—and by extension to create a new version of reality for his species.”

Even in modern terms, our psychological and medical knowledge of mind and brain have added more complications to the doctrine of free will, yet it survives and grows. And all the while I worked on this note, I felt strong connections involving free will, determinism, and probable realities—connections largely unexpressed and unexplored in our world’s societies.