“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.

Then today we read how scientists at a company that markets animals for medical research have bred a strain of hairless laboratory mice without thymus glands. The thymus gland helps a body create immunity against outside infections. Scientists often use “athymic” mice in cancer research, for example, since the mice do not reject tumor transplants. [Indeed, these animals are so sensitive to disease of any kind that they must be raised under sterile conditions.] Jane was very upset by the article and mentioned it to me several times.¹

(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.)

10:14 P.M. “I know he went into that article on the mice.” Jane laughed, almost against her will. “I also know he’s going to redeem it all, in spite of everything. Although I don’t know how you can redeem it for the mice…. Once again, she was surprised that she’d delivered so much material in so short a time.

1. Jane and I are both aware of and frustrated by the obvious ambiguities in our own feelings about the use of animals in medical research. We also think that most other people have such mixed feelings, whether they realize it or not. Were either of our own physical lives saved—perhaps even before birth—by those using knowledge gained from animal experimentation? We don’t know. We do know that it’s much easier to condone a philosophy espousing traumatic and repetitive animal research if one is relatively shielded from it.

However, if given a choice, Jane and I now would forgo the “benefits” stemming from animal experimentation, even if our own future welfares were to suffer because of a subsequent lack of knowledge—and providing that at a time of crisis we didn’t weaken in our joint resolve! Following such a course would actually be most difficult, so pervasive in our society are the results flowing from animal research: I even think it might be necessary to live as a hermit in the wild to get away from them. Using animals in the laboratory is imposing human goals and values upon other life forms, even though the modern scientific method is supposed to be value-free. For such research is carried out in the name of progress and the practical common good, of course—and that progress applies also in the remedial treatment of other animals, let us remember. We think that every reader of this book has benefited, and still does, from animal experimentation, some of it most cruel, in ways that he or she can hardly suspect, let alone specify: even benefiting from the use of animals in the study of medical and chemical, beauty and recreational products that can be found in practically every home in the country. Jane and I live in one of those homes. I see the passive, thinking and unthinking tolerance of animal experimentation as a classical case of a society using ends to justify means—yet in the United States, at least, we carefully teach each generation of our species that such rationalizations aren’t morally acceptable….

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.