“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While Jane has been enjoying many periods of ease and relaxation, she’s also had bouts of blueness over her general stiffness and walking difficulties [her “symptoms”]. But she’s finally dispensed with the last stages of her cold, which had turned out to be much heavier than mine, and is feeling a resurgence of energy for the sessions. Her own work has been going well for the most part, however—she expects to finish Chapter 12 of God of Jane tomorrow. Because of her concentration on that hook she hasn’t done much on her book of poetry, If We Live Again, since late February; and as I mentioned in the Preface for Dreams, she laid aside her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, in May 1979 when she began God of Jane. As for myself, I’ve progressed to working with Session 860 [for June 13, 1979], which bridges chapters 8 and 9 in Mass Events.

Today Jane reread her recent sessions for Dreams; she wanted to resume work on the book tonight, and picked up on it from Seth throughout the day. She told me bits of the material at times, but I didn’t retain them. [She also relayed to me Seth’s comments about an article on bird migration that I read to her while we were having lunch, but I lost those too.] Jane called me early for the session—at 8:20, while I was still busy with Mass Events. She wanted to get started: “I still feel nervous about going back to the book….”

The body is equipped to perform far better, in a variety of ways, than you give it credit for, however—but the fact remains that the genetic structure focuses volition. The genetic apparatus and the chromosomal messages actually contain far more information than is ever used. That genetic information can, for example, be put together in an infinite number of ways. (Long pause.) The species cares for itself in the event of any possible circumstance, so that the genetic messages also carry an endless number of triggers that will change genetic combinations if this becomes necessary.

Beyond that, however, genetic messages are coded in such a way that there is a constant give-and-take between those messages and the present experience of any given individual. That is, no genetic event is inevitable.

—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.

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.

3. See the Preface for Dreams. In the notes immediately preceding the private session for September 13, 1979, I quoted some of the very evocative material on animal cultures and civilizations that Seth had given in Chapter 5 of Mass Events.