“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The Dominican Republic is an economically very poor country occupying the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies. Yesterday Jane and I reread an article I’d filed last September, then forgotten about: In the area surrounding a certain village in the Dominican Republic, 38 girls have turned into boys at the onset of puberty. These remarkable physical changes stem from a genetic “defect” carried by a common ancestor who lived more than a century ago. The men have low sperm counts and may not be able to sire children in the normal manner, yet Jane and I think that this rare group event—the only one of its kind on record—fits in with Seth’s material about the millions of variations contained within our species’ vast genetic pool. For whatever mysterious reasons, then, our overall consciousness wants and needs this particular “genetic culture.” See the portion of the last session given as the opening of this chapter.

Before the session she said that she felt material from Seth “around,” concerning genetics.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(I was shaking my head no, grinning, before Seth finished asking his question. My amusement wasn’t directed at the seriousness of his material, but arose because of the intense scrutiny Seth directed at me. All during her trance tonight, Jane’s blue-gray eyes had been especially dark and luminous.)

See Note 3 for a few comments relative to Seth’s discussion of genetics in the session.)

3. Originally I’d planned a series of notes for this session, in which to explore Seth’s ideas on genetics versus those held by the scientific establishment. Those plans gradually evaporated as I realized that it would take many pages to compare the two viewpoints in any detail. We’re in the early stages of an extensive scientific growth involving genetics, and certainly by the time this book is published much more information will have been acquired, even if it’s of the same general kind. If they knew about it, I expect that most members of the scientific community would disagree with much of the excellent material Seth gave in this session. Not all would—or will—of course. But Jane and I don’t try to bend others to our way of thinking; the reality that our species is creating is too big and varied for that; we believe only that we’ll have to explore questions like those involving genetics and consciousness in our own ways, and with Seth’s help.

Nor do I think that establishment science will soon be interested in Seth’s ideas that exchanges take place involving our genetic systems, the environment, and cultural events like politics and economics; or that our genetic systems react to our thoughts and emotions—let alone that there’s any genetic planning for future probabilities! I do not know whether, or how, any of those factors could be measured and/or manipulated in the laboratory. Science could grant Seth’s ideas their own realities outside of the scientific framework, of course, and thus be free of them.

But granted or not, the idea of any sort of genetic preparation for future contingencies collides with the very powerful theory of evolution, which holds that evolutionary, genetic changes take place only through natural selection and chance mutations (although random or chance mutations are generally regarded as mistakes on nature’s part). There are many unsolved challenges here. I can even see Seth’s material in this session being scientifically dismissed as another version of old, discredited Lamarckian theories. (Jean Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck [1744–1829] was a French naturalist who advocated that certain modifications of an organism’s structure and function could develop in response to environmental factors, and that these “acquired characters” could be inherited. Lamarck’s work has been widely misunderstood, however. It still has value, and recently has been employed in some remarkable scholarly studies that show how, in scientific terms, evolution can take place through means other than natural selection and chance mutations.)

I’m sure that Seth would be the first to agree that consciousness obviously contains an unlimited number of viewpoints, regardless of which ones we humans may choose to call “true” at any particular time. Consciousness is just as amenable to having some of its physical manifestations scientifically studied, its parts manipulated through “genetic engineering,” as it is to encompassing Seth’s material. All of our species’ actions represent our keen and creative interests in studying ourselves in the finest details possible. That the scientific approach has limitations is obvious. So do all others in this physical realm. A discipline, of whatever nature and motivation, can erect barriers to “outside” influences—and those barriers are often artifacts growing almost automatically out of the very nature of the belief system in question.