“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Just before the session she showed me a page of notes she’d picked up from Seth today, about the subject matter for tonight’s session—but we had no time in which to discuss them.)

(Slowly at 9:20:) There is nothing wrong with technology. Man has an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity. (Pause.) When men use tools in accord with (pause) the “dictates” of value fulfillment, those tools are effective. Your technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree—but not entirely—been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment. Therefore, you end up with a technology that threatens to work no longer. You end up with affairs of great national and world concern, such as the Three Mile Island episode, and other lesser-known near-nuclear accidents.

(Sometimes I become a bit puzzled as I prepare Seth’s material for publication. My first thought was to recast his subjunctive mood in the next paragraph entirely in the present tense. My second thought was to leave the paragraph as it is—but to add the two bracketed inserts for greater clarity. I do not like to change Seth’s information, and almost always avoid doing so.)

Now, the overall purpose supposedly is the utilization of energy—a humanitarian project meant to bring light and warmth to millions of homes. But that intent was sabotaged because the philosophy behind it denied the validity of the very subjective values that give man his reason for living. Because those values were forgotten, life was threatened.

Now: Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding—a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.

There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned. Such people are not considered retarded, of course. I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both were immeasurably enhanced.

The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement. Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically. Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society. The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand.

A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded. I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values.

Now as far as the species is concerned, all variations are necessary—and it is as if (underlined) in one instance a member of the species—for its own reasons, but also on behalf of the whole—decides to specialize in one particular area, to isolate certain abilities, so to speak, and display them with the greatest tenacity and brilliance, while nearly completely ignoring certain other areas. In your society, however, the capacities of the reasoning mind have been considered in opposition to the intuitive abilities, so that your ideas of what a person is or should be largely ignore the idea of emotional achievement, emotional understanding.

It is as if certain members of the species, for their own reasons, and again on the part of the whole, specialized this time in the use of emotional capacities. But those people are usually considered retarded.

10:36 P.M. Although it had ranged from being slow to fast, Jane’s delivery had often been quite forceful. She told me that Seth had changed the beginning of the session because of her reactions to the mail this noon, but that finally he’d gotten into some of the material she’d picked up from him today, and written down. Seth hadn’t covered her notes about caveman art, however; she’d especially looked forward to his comments on that subject.

“But I don’t want the Seth books to end up criticizing everything,” Jane said.

“I know. But I want the books to be reassuring….”)

1. Jane’s particular mood today, and my own remarks, shouldn’t be taken to mean that we don’t understand why people attend psychic fairs, for example. I think that each person at that gathering shown on television was looking for news about man’s origin and nature—even if, in our opinions, it’s too simplistic to postulate the existence of a great council on one of the far planets of our solar system. To us, that concept is an exteriorized distortion of the “great council” that each one of us carries within ourselves. But there are many ramifications here, and it’s obvious that studying the Seth material is hardly the only way to explore reality. Human beings are far too diverse to be satisfied by any one system of thought, or even by any related group of them.