“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.

There are also what I will call genetic dreams, which are inspired directly by genetic triggering. These help form and direct consciousness as it exists in any given individual from before birth.

The fetus dreams. As its physical growth takes place in the womb, so the shaping of its consciousness is also extended by genetic dreams. These particular fetus-oriented dreams are most difficult to describe, for they are actually involved with forming the contours of the individual consciousness. Such dreams provide (pause) the subjective understanding from which thoughts are developed, and in those terms complete thoughts are possible before the brain itself is fully formed. It is the process of thinking that helps bring the brain into activity, and not the other way around (all quite intently).

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.

Genetic dreams of one kind or another continue throughout your lives, whether or not you are consciously aware of them. They were of prime importance in “man’s evolution,” as you think of it. They were the source of dreams, mentioned earlier, that sent man on migrations after food, that led him toward fertile land. Those dreams are most closely related to survival in physical existence, and whenever that survival seems threatened such dreams arise to consciousness whenever possible.

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.

(Long pause.) Whenever man believes that life is meaningless, whenever he feels that value fulfillment is impossible, or indeed nonexistent, then he undermines his genetic heritage. He separates himself from life’s meaning. He feels vacant inside. Man for centuries attached faith, hope, and charity to the beliefs of established religions. Instead, these are genetic attributes, inspired and promoted by the inseparable unity of spirit in flesh. (Pause.) The animals are quite as familiar with faith, hope, and charity as you are, and often exemplify it in their own frameworks of existence to a better extent. Any philosophy that promotes the idea that life is meaningless is biologically dangerous. It promotes feelings of despair that directly hamper genetic activity. Such philosophies are extremely disadvantageous creatively, since they dampen the emotional spirits and exuberance, and sense of play, from which creativity itself emerges.

(9:49.) The intellectual ideas of societies, therefore, also have a great effect upon which genetic systems are triggered, and which ones are not.

You have genetic systems, then, carrying (long pause) information that is literally incalculatable.¹ Now: Through your technologies, through your physical experience, you are also surrounded by an immense array of communication and information of an exterior nature. You have your telephones, radios, televisions, your earth satellites—all networks that process and convey data. Those inner biological systems and the exterior ones may seem quite separate. They are intimately connected, however. The information you receive from your culture, from your arts, sciences, fields of economics, is all translated, decoded, turned into cellular information. Certain genetic diseases, for example, may be activated or not activated according to the cultural climate at any given time, as the relative safety or lack of it in that climate is interpreted through private experience.

In one way or another, the living genetic system has an effect upon your cultural reality, and the reverse also applies. All of this is further complicated by the purposes and intents of the generations in any historical period, and the reincarnational influences.

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.

Again, such times are closely bound with reincarnational intents that direct the genetic triggering, and that meet in the culture the further stimulus that may be required. The time of the great masters in the fields of painting and sculpture is a case in point (humorously and louder)—so you see, I am getting to one of your favorite questions,² and we will continue the discussion at our next session.

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.