“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I’ve had a rough day,” she said as we sat for the session. Actually, she was twice irritated. First had come her reactions to a group of upsetting letters she’d received this noon: One is a 20-page missive from a mental patient who wants returned to him all of the notes, objects, manuscripts, and books of poetry he’s sent her over the years: another is from a woman who informed us that she’s writing a book dictated by Seth: a third is a long letter from a man who’s claiming us as his counterparts, for reasons we can’t agree with. There are others. In these cases, it seems impossible that we’ll ever be able to communicate effectively with the individuals involved, although we’re sincerely trying to understand why each of them contacted us.

It is vital for the proper workings of genetic systems. It is a prerequisite for individual health and for the overall vitality of any given “stock.” Your greatest achievements have been produced by civilizations during those times when man had the greatest faith in the meaningfulness of life in general, and in the meaningfulness of the individual within life’s framework.

No matter what science says about certain values being outside of its frame of reference, science implies that those values are therefore without basis. The reasoning qualities of the mind are directed away from any exploration that might bring about any acceptable scientific evidence for such values, therefore. The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores (quietly emphatic, and repeated).

There are, overall, some processes important in man’s development, and in the development of the species. Efforts, methods that work against value fulfillment phase themselves out, for in the long run they do not work.

(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.

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.

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.

Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.

The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided—all loaded, of course, at man’s end at the expense of the other species, and [with] all thinking in terms of progress along very narrow consecutive lines. Such ideas have much to do with the way you think of yourselves, and what you consider human characteristics, and the light in which you view those who vary in one way or another from those norms.

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.

(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.

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.