“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.

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.

(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.

(10:09. I did have a question for Seth now—one made up of a number of questions, actually, and another one of my favorites. It’s easily the longest I’ve asked in a session. It grows out of Seth’s philosophy, obviously, yet it also reflects my own, and concerns man’s attempts to both fight and grasp his heritage. Here’s a condensation of what I said:

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.

“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….”)

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.

If there is no life after life,
then what a lack
of cosmic economy,
for nature strings one molecule
on to another so craftily
that each seed can grow a tree,
and contains the properties
of an entire forest,
while multiplications
are hidden everywhere.