“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, the genetic system is a far more open one than is usually supposed. It not only contains and conveys information, but it also reacts to information from the physical and cultural worlds.

In a way I hope to explain, then, the genetic system also reacts to those beliefs and events that are paramount in any given civilization. Events can trigger genetic activity—not simply through, say, chemical reactions, but through individual and mass beliefs about the safety or lack of it in the world at large.

Such thoughts are like, now (underline “like, now”), electrical patterns that form their own magnets. (Long pause.) The ability to conceptualize is present in the fetus, and the fetus does conceptualize. The precise orientation of that conceptualizing, and the precise orientation of the thinking patterns, wait for certain physical triggers received from the parents and the environment after birth, but the processes of conceptualization and of thought are already established. This establishment takes place in genetic dreams (again, all intently).

(Long pause at 9:22.) Give us a moment…. The ability to use language is also genetically built-in, through the precise orientation, again, with the physical triggering of the parents’ native language. Children learn such languages mentally long before they are physically capable of speaking them; but again, in genetically inspired dreams, children—or rather, infants—practice language. Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the fetus genetic dreams involve the coding and interpretation of language. Those dreams themselves inspire the physical formations necessary to bring about their own actualizations.

They are the dreams that warn of famines or of wars. Such dreams, however, can also be triggered often, as in your own times, when the conscious mind is convinced that the survival of the species is threatened—and in such cases the dreams then actually represent man’s fears. Overanxiety, then, can confuse the genetic system, and in a variety of ways. The existence of each of the species is dependent upon trust, indeed a biological optimism, in which each species feels the freedom to develop the potentials of its members in relative safety, within the natural frameworks of existence. Each species comes into being not merely feeling a natural built-in trust in its own validity, but is literally propelled by exuberance in its ability to cope with its environment. It knows that it is uniquely suited to its place within life’s framework. The young of all species exhibit an unquenchable rambunctiousness. That rambunctiousness is built in.

(With emphasis, while Billy slept curled up against my left elbow as I sat on the couch writing down Seth’s material:) Animals know that their own lives spell out life’s meaning. They feel their relationship with all other forms of life. They know that their existences are vitally important in the framework of planetary existence. Beyond that, they identify themselves with the spirit of life within them so fully and so completely that to question its meaning would be inconceivable. Not inconceivable because such creatures cannot think, but because life’s meaning is so self-evident to them.

Value fulfillment always implies the search for excellence—not perfection, but excellence. Excellence (pause) in any given area—emotional, physical, intellectual, intuitional, scientific—is reflected in other areas, and by its mere existence serves as a model for achievement. This kind of excellence need not be structured, then, into any one aspect of life, though it may appear in any aspect, and wherever it appears it is an echo of a spiritual and biological directive, so to speak. There are different historical periods, in your terms, where the species has showed what it can do—and what is possible in certain specific directions when the genetic and reincarnational triggers are touched and opened full blast, so that certain characteristics appear in their clearest, most spectacular light, to serve as individual models and as models for the species as a whole.

There are those who overrelied upon religious beliefs, using them as crutches, and in [later lives] then, they might—such people—throw those crutches away overreacting to their newfound “freedom”; and through living lives as meaningless they then realize, after death, that the meaningfulness of existence was after all not dependent upon any religious system. It was there all along, but they had not seen it.

10:20 P.M. I told Jane that the session is excellent. Her delivery had often been rather fast and intent—even impassioned. She laughed. “See, I wanted him to come through and say something about me, without my asking, but he didn’t.” She hadn’t mentioned such a desire to me. “I got something about genetic dreams while I was doing the dishes tonight—just the phrase,” she said. “Anyhow, I feel better after the session than I did before it.

“But tonight I had the feeling after the session that it’s a real full one—that I really got to the heart of something,” Jane added. “I like that. The last session didn’t give me that feeling, but when I read it, it was fine….”)

1. There isn’t any such word as incalculatable, of course, but that’s what Jane came through with as she spoke for Seth. She obviously meant to say “incalculable.” Seldom indeed does she make such slips while delivering the Seth material—much less often than any of us may do in daily life.

2. Seth referred to a question I periodically ask Jane, but seldom discuss with others simply because they don’t seem to be interested: What’s happened to all of the Rembrandts? Why isn’t there at least one artist in all of the world painting today whose ability equals Rembrandt’s, and who uses that great gift to evoke the depths of compassion for the human condition as Rembrandt did? For in my opinion there isn’t such a one around. By extension, why isn’t there a Rubens or a Velázquez or a Vermeer operating now? My choices are personally arbitrary, of course—yet why don’t we have a Rembrandt contributing to our current reality? Just those four artists, whose lives spanned a period of only 98 years (from 1577 to 1675), explored human insight in powerful ways. To link the “great masters” with our species’ reincarnational intents and drives, as Seth mentions in this session, opens up a new field for understanding my question, and a very large and intriguing one indeed.