“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) In physical reality, if you will forgive me, life is the name of the game—and the game is based upon value fulfillment. That means simply that each form of life seeks toward the fulfillment and unfolding of all of the capacities that it senses within its living framework, knowing that in that individual fulfillment each other species of life is also benefited.

(9:45.) In no way do I mean to demean the indisputable value of geniuses, or their great contributions to the quality of life—but the quality of life is, again, also benefited by the existence of idiots. Not only because both ends of the scale are necessary for genetic reasons, but also because idiots themselves are in no way considered failures or defects by nature. Those terms are human judgments. Idiots also serve their role by moderating the sometimes fierce hold that the reasoning mind can (underlined) have upon human activity.

The reasoning mind, as you have used it thus far, roughly (underlined) since the birth of Christianity, has used—instead of used, confined—has confined its reasoning abilities to a very narrow spectrum of reality. It has seen the value of life largely only as that life conforms to its own standards. (Pause.) That is, the reasoning mind, as you have used it, considers that only reasoning creatures are capable of understanding life’s values. Other forms of life have almost seemed beside the point, their value considered only insofar as they were of service to man. But man’s life is obviously dependent upon the existence of life’s other species, and with him those species share certain values. Life is sacred—all life—and again, all life seeks value fulfillment, not simply physical survival.

Ruburt was incensed by the article that he read, and he said indignantly that such procedures involve a biological immorality. I usually avoid terms like “morality” or “immorality,” since their definitions vary according to the individual. The proceedings, however, do involve a biological violation, a going against nature’s flow and intent, a process in which a form of life is made to go against its own value fulfillment, and it is because of such attitudes involving other kinds of life that the horrors of the Jewish war camps were made possible.

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.)