“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Other people may be sophisticated, brilliantly aware of their own feelings and those of other people, intuitively knowledgeable in the handling of relationships, even, as adults, exquisite parents—yet they may be labeled as retarded if they do not live up to certain artificial intellectual standards. They are actually in the same position at the other end as the people mentioned earlier.

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.