“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.)