“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) You are, I hope, coming toward a time of greater psychological synthesis, so that the intuitions and reasoning abilities work together in a much more smooth fashion, so that emotional and intuitive knowledge regarding the meaningfulness of life can find clearer precision and expression, as the intellect is taught—as the intellect is taught—to use its faculties in a far less restricted manner.

There are grass-roots organizations—cults, groups of every persuasion—growing up in your country as small groups of people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning. These groups represent (long pause) the beginnings of new journeys quite as important to the species as any sea voyage ever was as man searched for new lands.

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.

(10:28.) Now: (Long pause.) Mankind is a species (long pause) that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary. Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes. The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience. It connects your emotions and your reason. All species are interconnected, so, as I said earlier, when you think you think for yourselves, you also specialize in thinking for the rest of nature, which physically sustains you.