“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For that matter, [the same is true of] environment, as it is usually understood. Your cultural beliefs predispose you to interpret experience in terms of heredity and environment, however, so that you focus primarily upon them as prime causes of behavior. This in turn results in much more structured experience than necessary. You do not concentrate upon the exceptions — the children who do not seem to fit the patterns of their families or environments, so of course no attempts are made to view those kinds of unofficial behavior.

The human personality is far more open to all kinds of stimuli than is supposed. If information is thought to come to the self only through physical means, then of course heredity and environment must be seen behind human motivation. When you realize that the personality can and does have access to other kinds of information than physical, then you must begin to wonder what effects those data have on the formation of character and individual growth. Children do already possess character at birth, and the entire probable intent of their lives exists then as surely as does the probable plan for the adult body they will later possess.

(10:26) A child may be born with a strong talent for music, for example. Say the child is unusually gifted. Before he [or she] is old enough to begin any kind of training, he will know on other levels the probable direction that music will take during his lifetime. He will be acquainted in the dream state with other young budding musicians, though they are infants also. Again, probabilities will be set into motion, so that each child’s intent reaches out. There is great flexibility, however, and according to individual purposes many such children will also be acquainted with music of the past. To one extent or another this applies to every field of endeavor as each person adds to the world scene, and as the intents of each individual, added to those of each other person alive, multiply — so that the fulfillment of the individual results in the accomplishments of your world.³ And the lack of fulfillment of course produces those lacks that are also so apparent.

Give us a moment… Some readers have brothers or sisters, or both. Others are only children. Your ideas of individuality hamper you to a large extent. To one extent or another, again, each portion of consciousness, while itself, contains [the] potentials of all consciousnesses. Your private information about the world is not nearly as private as you suppose, therefore, for behind the experience of any one event, each of you possesses information pertaining to other dimensions of that same event that you do not ordinarily perceive.

I mailed the last chapter of Emir to Prentice-Hall just a month ago (on February 8). Because of various delays, Jane is still waiting for news of the book’s official acceptance, even though she knows that Tam and other executives there like it very much. Emir, however, is of an in-between length — shorter than a novel, far longer than most children’s books — and she wonders: Is that fact going to complicate Prentice-Hall’s presentation of Emir as a story for “readers of all ages”? There’s talk of publishing it in two shorter volumes. Jane doesn’t know what to think. In the meantime, see the opening notes for Session 814.