“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“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.

The variations are endless. On the whole, in the vast scheme of reincarnational reality, a belief in life’s meaning is by far the rule, and other excursions are indeed eccentric variations. Specifically, however, such life episodes will of course involve their “moments” of after-death realization—dismay, shock, or what have you.

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.