“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I will clear up my meaning of the word “natural” later. However, when you examine animal behavior even in its most natural-seeming environment, for instance, you are not observing the basic behavior patterns of such creatures, because those relatively isolated areas exist in your world. Quite simply, you cannot have one or two or twenty officially-designated natural regions in which you observe animal activity, and expect to find anything more than the current adaptation of those creatures — an adaptation that is superimposed upon their “natural” reactions.

The balance of resources, animal travel patterns, migrations, weather conditions — all of these must be taken into consideration. Such isolated observation areas merely present you with a distorted picture of natural behavior, because the animals are also imprisoned within them. Civilization binds them round.

To some extent the churches as well as the scientists are responsible, but priests and scientists are not some foreign people, thrust upon you. They represent various aspects of yourselves. The species developed its own kind of consciousness, as it found it necessary to isolate itself to some degree from its environment and the other creatures within it. As a result, the religions preached that only man had a soul and was dignified by emotional feelings. In its way science went along very nicely by postulating man in a mechanistic world, with each creature run by an impeccable machine of instinct, blind alike to pain or desire.