“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt read an article about the development of a strain of mice without thymus [glands]. Since the thymus is very important in the necessary process of maintaining bodily resistance to disease, these particular mice have little resistance. They are bred and sold for experimental purposes. The intent of such procedures is to promote the quality of human life, to study the nature of diseases, and hopefully apply what is learned to some of the lives of human beings. Mice are not considered human. They are not. So like any animal, they are thought of as dispensable, sacrificed to a fine humanitarian end.

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….

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.