“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause in an intent delivery.) The entire idea of evolution, of course, requires strict adherence to the concept of continuing time, and the changes that time brings, and such concepts can at best provide the most surface kind of explanation for the existence of your species or any other.

I hope, again, to stretch the reaches of both your imaginations and intellects in this book, to give you a feeling for events larger than your usual true-or-false, fact-or-fancy categories. Your existence as a species is characterized far more by your unique use of your imaginations than it is by any physical attributes. Your connections with that unmanifest universe have always helped direct your imaginations, made you aware of the rich veins of probabilities possible in physical existence, so that you could then use your intellects to decide which of the alternate routes you wanted as a species to follow.

(9:46.) In that regard, it is true that in the other species innate knowledge is more clearly, brilliantly, and directly translated into action. I am not speaking of some dumb instinct, but instead of an intuitive knowing, a high intelligence different from your own, but amazingly complex, with which other species are equipped.²

In the terms of evolution as you like to think of it, ideas are more important than genes (quietly), for we are again dealing with more than the surfaces of events. We are dealing with more than some physical mechanics of being. For one thing, the genes themselves are conscious, though in different terms than yours. Your cultures—your civilizations—obviously affect the well-being of your species, and those cultures are formed by your ideas, and forged through the use of your imaginations and your intellects.

Certain bloodlines, in your terms, were extinguished because of your beliefs in Christianity, as people were killed in your holy wars. (Pause.) Your beliefs have directed who should go to war and who should not, who should live and who should die, who should be educated and who should not, who should be isolated from society and who should not—all matters directly touching upon the survival of certain families throughout history, and therefore affecting the species as a whole.

I am not here specifically blaming Christianity, for far before its emergence, your ideas (underlined) and beliefs about good and evil [were] far more important in all matters regarding the species than any simple questions of genetic variances, natural selection, or environmental influence. In man’s case, at least, the selection of who should live or die was often anything but natural. If you are to understand the characteristics of the species, then you cannot avoid the study of man’s consciousness.

3. I think that Seth’s insight here—regarding “the far more dependable behavior of the other species”—is excellent indeed. In an original way he stressed the interdependence of all life forms on earth. I like to keep such penetrating remarks before me, and wish the reader would too, for I often fear they’ll become lost from conscious view within his material. (As an example, I doubt if this one will be referred to in the index for Dreams.) But I also think that intuitively we know the truth Seth so briefly expressed here, and that it never has been or ever will be really lost.