“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Let us become more practical, and see how these issues merge in your reality. Some of this requires a great honesty on your own parts, as you try to recall some feelings and daydreams that you have tried to put away or forget or disown. Why are some people, then, born with conditions that are certainly experienced as genetically defective, granting even the overall value of such variances on the part of the species? For, again, I must stress the fact that in its way nature makes no such judgments, regardless of the beliefs of your science or religions.

Science seems to be of the opinion that the individual is important only insofar as (louder:) he or she serves the purposes of the species’ survival—and I am not saying that. I am saying that the existence of each individual is (underlined) important to the value fulfillment of the species. And moreover, I am stating that the value fulfillment of the individual and the species go hand in hand.

(Long pause at 9:13.) I am also stating that the species is itself aware of those conditions that lead to its own value fulfillment, and that of its members. No species basically (underlined) biologically considers its own existence with other species except in a cooperative manner—that is, there is no basic competition between species. When you think that there is, you are reading nature wrong. Whatever man’s conscious beliefs, on a biological level his genetic structure is intimately related to the genetic structure of all other species.

In man, the probabilities of development are literally numberless. No computer could count the combinations of characteristics possible. It is highly important, then, that the species retain flexibility, and not become locked into any one pattern, however advantageous (intently)—and I am referring to physical or mental patterns. Within the framework of established specieshood, there must be every kind of leeway—leeways that are biologically activated, so that variances are constantly active. Those genetic variances may appear as defective or eccentric. They may appear as the handicapped. They may appear as superior characteristics of one kind or another, but they must be biologically stated as the variations from the genetic norm.

Those questions help bring out psychological maturities and insights about the nature of the species in general. Many such conditions also serve to keep man’s sympathies alive. I make a distinction between sympathy and pity, for a lively sympathy leads toward construction, toward the utilization of abilities, even to social discourse, while pity can be deadening.

Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course. Many religious dogmas consider such conditions, again, the result of a god’s punishment. The survival of the species is far more dependent upon your subjective activities than your physical ones—for it is your subjective behavior that is responsible for your physical acts. Science of course looks at it the other way around, as if your physical acts are the result of a robot’s mechanical, formalized behavior—a robot miraculously programmed by the blind elements of an accidental universe formed by chance. The robot is programmed only to survive at anyone’s or anything’s expense. It has no real consciousness of its own. Its thoughts are merely mental mirages, so if one of its parts is defective then obviously it is in deep trouble. But man is no robot, and each so-called genetic defect has an internal part to play in the entire picture of genetic reality. The principle of uncertainty must operate genetically, or you would have been locked into overspecializations as a species.²

Here in Dreams Seth uses the uncertainty principle as an analogy (and an excellent one), meaning that as the positions and motions of elementary particles, say, cannot be simultaneously measured precisely, so our genetic qualities and their motions can not always be specifically determined. In Dreams he’s already said (in Session 909) that the human species has an “amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom,” and (in Session 910) that “your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate.” Choices and probabilities apply. Thus do we avoid genetic rigidity.