“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

“The other day Jane and I were talking about people who maintain that the universe is an accident, or that it has no meaning, or that there’s no such thing as life after death, or that psychic abilities don’t exist—that sort of thing. People who call themselves skeptics, who seem to have a very rigid focus only within what they call physical reality. Those attitudes are very common. Some people have built careers around negative beliefs like that, and Jane and I were wondering how they react after physical death, when they discover that they still live—that they may have spent their professional lives maintaining belief systems which after death they begin to understand are quite wrong. How do they react? Are those individuals even aware of their earlier beliefs? Do they care what they used to think? Are they shocked, do they have feelings of regret or embarrassment, or what? Or is there such a variety of responses possible that you can’t answer the question simply? And how do such people react after death when they start to get glimmerings about the workings of reincarnation,³ for example?”

Reincarnational patterns apply also. Some people, having lived lives believing in one religious system or another, being completely immersed in them, give themselves shock treatments of sorts, then, living lives in which they believe in nothing, or at least freeing themselves from any beliefs—only to discover, of course, that a belief in nothing is the most confining belief of all. That realization is the eye-opener, in such cases.

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.

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.