“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause, one of many, at 9:51.) Give us a moment… To some extent your society’s beliefs allow you enough freedom so that most of you trust your bodies while they are growing toward adulthood. Then, however, many of you no longer rely upon the processes of life within you. Certain scientific treatises often make you believe that the attainment of your adulthood has little purpose, except to insure the further existence of the species through parenthood — when nature is then quite willing to dispense with your services. You are quite simply told that you have no other purpose.³ The species itself must then appear to have no reason except a mindless determination to exist. The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics. Period. In both cases man’s nature, and nature in general, take short shrift.

3. Seth referred to the latest scientific ideas concerning “selfish genes” — a subject Jane and I had been talking about today. (Genes are units found on the chromosomes of the cell nucleus; they carry hereditary characteristics, and consist mainly of protein and DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.)

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.