“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.) Some (underlined) varieties of your own species were considered by the animals as diseased animal species, so I want to broaden your concepts there. In the entire natural scheme, and at all levels — even social or economic ones — disease always has its own creative basis. Abnormalities of any kind in birth always represent probable versions of the species itself — and they are kept in the gene pool to provide a never-ending bank of alternates.

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.