“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them. They became frightened of disease, particularly in the case of plagues.

(2. The use of animals — rats, say — in experiments involving injections, before giving them to human beings. [Man’s psychological reality is so sweepingly different from that of the animals, Jane added now, that he would inevitably show a wide variety of reactions.]

(“I think these animal doctors were a variety of apelike ancestor,” Jane said. “Not apes as we think of them, but a bridge between animals and human beings. They were our size, more or less. They weren’t four-footed. I saw creatures who walked upright — hairy, with brilliant compassionate eyes….”