“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

Our many excellent “modern” painters inevitably work within a different world ambience. Our species’ art is just no longer the same—a fact I both applaud and mourn. However, I do feel that in the course of ordinary time we have either lost certain qualities of art or no longer stress them.