“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Briefly, remember analogies I have made in the past, comparing the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape — which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art. In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color — a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action. Those of you now living, say, are in the same life class. You look about to see how your contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and you find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits. And all of these portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of your world.

(Long pause at 10:01.) Your culture has its biological effect upon the species. I am not speaking of obvious connections in a derogatory manner, such as pollution and so forth. If you were thinking in old terms of evolution, then I would be saying that your cultures and civilizations actually alter the chromosomal messages. Your thoughts affect your cells, again, and they can change what are thought of as hereditary factors. Give us a moment… Your imaginations are intimately connected with your diseases, just as your imaginations are so important in all other areas of your lives. You form your being by imaginatively considering such-and-such a possibility, and your thoughts affect your body in that regard. In a way, illness is a tool used on behalf of life, for people have given it social, economic, psychological, and religious connotations. It becomes another area of activity and of expression.

(10:20.) Give us a moment… Now many of the characteristics you consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species. It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species. (Intently:) You learned to dream differently than other creatures. I thought you would like that quotation.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact. You would not have had (pause) any way (pause) of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations. You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.