“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:40.) Give us a moment… The phase of death is, then, a part of life’s cycle. I mentioned evolutionary experiments,² as you think of evolution. There is a disease you read about recently, where the skin turns leathery after intense itching — a fascinating development in which the human body tries to form a leathery-like skin that would, if the experiment continued, be flexible enough for, say, sweat pores and normal locomotion, yet tough enough to protect itself in jungle environments from the bites of many “still more dangerous” insects and snakes.³ Many such experiments appear in certain stages as diseases, since the conditions are obviously not normal physical ones. To some extent (underlined twice), cancer also represents a kind of evolutionary experiment. But all such instances escape you because you think of so-called evolution as finished.

(Pause, then with amusement:) In our next book, we will try to acquaint people with the picture of their true nature as a species, as they exist independently of their belief systems. We will hope to show man’s origin as existing in an inner environment, and emphasize the importance of dreams in “evolutionary advancement,” and as the main origin of man’s most creative achievements.

(9:56 P.M. “Boy, how he got all that out of me, I don’t know,” Jane laughed, for she had been very relaxed before the session. Her delivery had moved right along. I’ve deleted a few portions of the session that don’t apply to disease and evolutionary experimentation. Jane reported that when Seth gave the material on onchocerciasis she “really felt that the people’s skins were trying to turn into some sort of leathery protection. I don’t know whether I got those sensations from Seth, picked them up on my own, or just created them myself to go along with the material.” She hadn’t been aware of any feelings involving her own skin.

Onchocerciasis doesn’t kill, and the percentage of victims who lose their sight varies according to location. We’d like to get more data from Seth on the experimental evolutionary aspects of the blindness, however, since we don’t understand how such a debilitating state could really lead to something better. (Perhaps in this particular biological experiment, the blindness represents an evolutionary dead end, in those terms.) We may ask Seth to elaborate before he finishes Mass Events.

Indeed, it seems that he probably has available enough information on the evolutionary aspects of disease to fill a book. To use his own word, it would be “fascinating,” should the three of us ever find the time to get to it. The whole idea of such biological experimentation makes us wonder just how, and to what extent, those impetuses may be involved with any of the “ordinary” diseases we’re so used to thinking of as just that — diseases.