“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In line with doing things differently, no session was held last Saturday night because over the weekend we decided to give up the Monday–Saturday session routine we’ve followed for the last eight months, and return to our original practice of holding sessions on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The change was made to give Jane more time on weekends to handle the mail. I don’t think my own daily work patterns will be affected much; I help her with the correspondence, but don’t spend nearly the time at it that she does.)

2. I underlined the word story (like this) in Seth’s material just to remind the reader that the Christ figure symbolizes our idea of God and his relationships. According to Seth, the man we call Jesus Christ was actually composed of three individuals who were the physical manifestations of the same nonphysical entity: John the Baptist, St. Paul, and a man historically known as Christ. None of these were crucified. Their roles became blended and distorted in history. Seth discussed the Christ story in various passages in The Seth Material and Seth Speaks, and has at least touched upon it in all of his succeeding books.

A number of scientists — biologists, zoologists, and psychologists, among others — have recently published highly praised books in which they claim to show how our genes manipulate our individual behavior with only their own genetic survival at stake, even when we think we are displaying subjective qualities like altruism. Jane and I think the idea of such self-centered genetic behavior is much too limited, simple, and “mechanistic,” to use another term that’s currently in scientific vogue. The idea of selfish genes also implies plan on the part of such entities — and so comes dangerously close to contradicting several basic tenets of science itself: among them that life arose by chance, that it perpetuates itself through random mutations and the struggle for existence (or natural selection), and that basically life has no meaning.

As I occasionally do in my notes, I’m anthropomorphosizing “science” by casting a multifaceted discipline in simple human or individual terms. But now it seems that when science claims to understand the workings of a molecule of DNA, for example — the “master molecule” of life, as it’s often called — science then states that it’s stripped away the mystery of DNA and reduced our functions to easily understood mechanistic ones. But Jane and I maintain that grasping the marvelous workings of DNA should instead increase our sense of the wonder and mystery of life. The DNA lies exposed in all of its parts, but the questions about the life within it remain unanswered. Why does science want us to live thinking that we’re creatures programmed only for the survival of our selfish genes? Even the biologists (and other scientists) who insist upon our mechanistic bases do so with feeling!