“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It may be difficult for you to understand, but your species means well. You understand that the tiger exists in a certain environment, and reacts according to his nature. So does man. Even his atrocities are committed in a distorted attempt to reach what he considers good goals. He fails often to achieve the goals, or even to understand how his very methods prevent their attainment.

To some extent, these are all unique and creative ponderings that on the part of the animals alone would be considered the most curious and enlightening intellectual achievements. The animals must relate to the earth, and so must man. As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man must pursue his ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

(10:01.) When he is destructive, man does not seek to be destructive per se; but in a desire to achieve that which he thinks of as a particular goal that to him is good, he forgets to examine the goodness of his methods.

When you are considering the future in your terms, constructive achievements are as realistic as destructive ones. In those terms, each year of man’s existence in fact justifies a more optimistic rather than pessimistic view. You cannot place man’s good intent outside of the physical context, for outside of that context you do not have the creature that you know. You cannot say that nature is good, but spawned man, which is a cancer upon it, for nature would have better sense. You cannot say, either, that Nature — with a capital N — will destroy man if he offends her, or that Nature — with a capital N — has little use for its own species, but only wants to promote Life — with a capital L — for Nature is within each member of each species; and without each member of each species, Nature — with a capital or a small N — would be nonexistent.