“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.

Animals also possess independent volition, and while I am emphasizing animals here, the same applies to any creature, large or small: insect, bird, fish, or worm; to plant life; to cells, atoms, or electrons. They possess free will in relationship to the conditions of their existence (underlined).

The conditions of existence are largely determined by genetic structure. Free will must then of course function in accordance with genetic integrity. Genetic structure makes possible physical organisms through which life is to be experienced, and to a large extent that structure must determine the kind of action possible in the world, and the way or ways in which volition can be effectively expressed.

(Pause.) Perhaps an analogy will help. An actor throwing himself or herself into a role, even momentarily lost in the part, is still alive and functioning as himself or herself in a context that is larger than the play. The character in the play is seemingly alive (creatively) for the play’s duration, perception being limited to that framework, yet to play that role the actor draws upon the experience of his own life. He brings to bear his own understanding, compassion, artistry, and if he is a good actor, or if she is, then when the play is over the actor is a better person for having played the role.

Now in the greater framework of reincarnational existences you choose your roles, or your lives, but the lines that you speak, the situations that you meet, are not predetermined. “You” live or exist in a larger framework of activity even while you live your life, and there is a rambunctious interplay between the yous in time and the you outside of time.

(Long pause.) The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative (underlined) psychological face that you use for the purposes of your life’s drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that you mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play’s formal structure. You cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past.

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.

I want to add that even with ideas of religious determinism—that man cannot know God’s will, for instance, or is quite dependent upon that divine grace—we’re still creating our conscious ideas of what God is, in those terms. So once again we have a determinism that operates within our sensual and intellectual boundaries: another framework within which we ceaselessly attempt to understand “the meaning of life.”