“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(They also fit in beautifully with my own recent feelings and questions about the behavior of our species, and Seth’s answering material. In fact, Seth had much more to present on the subject this evening, so even though he didn’t say so Jane and I take it for granted that this session belongs in Psyche.)

You realize that a tiger, following its nature, is not evil. Looking at your own species you are often less kindly, less compassionate, less understanding. It is easy to condemn your own kind.

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.

That intent may be confused, poorly executed, tangled amid conflicts of beliefs, strangled by the bloody hands of murders and wars — and yet no man or woman ever loses it. That represents the hope of the species, and it has ever remained lit, like a bright light within each member of the species; and that good intent is handed down through the generations. It is far more potent, that illumination, than any hates or national grudges that may also be passed along.

(Louder:) Grant your own species the same.

To identify man with his poorest works is to purposefully seek out the mars, the mistakes, of a fine artist, and then to condemn him. To do this is to condemn yourselves personally. If a scientist says consciousness is the result of chance, or Darwin’s theories say that basically man is a triumphant son of murderers, many people object. If you say, however, that men are idiots, or that they are not worth the ground they walk upon, you are saying the same thing. For you must be concerned with this reality as you know it; in those terms, to condemn man is to condemn the species as you know it, and the practical terms of your world.

(Loudly:) There are those who make careers of condemning the faults and failings of others, or of the species itself, and because of that attitude man’s great energy and good intent remain invisible. Man is in the process of becoming. His works are flawed — but they are the flawed apprentice works of a genius artist in the making, whose failures are indeed momentous and grotesque only in the light of his sensed genius, which ever leads him and directs him onward.

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.