“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Through the centuries philosophical and religious thinkers have created numerous complicated variations of ideas involving free will and determinism, so that neither thesis is as simple as it first appears to be. Man related the concept of free will long ago to the question of whether he could deliberately choose evil, for example. He still does. And he still struggles with questions about his freedom before God’s omnipotence and foreknowledge, and whether those qualities cause events, or can cause them, and whether they involve predestination. Opposing determinism is the idea that man has always fought for his personal responsibility—that instead of being controlled entirely by his heritage, he’s capable of forming new syntheses of thought and action based upon the complicated patterns of his own history.

In a strange way, determinism has always seemed lacking as a concept to Jane and me—for if it means what it’s supposed to mean, then surely human beings set up the parameters within which determinism is said to operate. I see this as a contradiction of the notion that the individual is entirely at the mercy of his or her history and of nature. How can we be, if through the ages we’ve created that history and nature against which we react? In other words, on joint and individual scales, vast though they may be, we do create our joint and individual realities.