“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

(Long pause.) Perhaps at first that prejudice of the reasoning mind might escape you, since after all mice are far divorced from your own species. (Louder:) There were Jews sacrificed to the same end not too long ago, and the reasoning was largely the same, though in that case you were dealing with your own species.

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.

(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.

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.)