“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Following Seth’s suggestion of November 25, we held the session in my studio, at the back of our apartment. It’s more private there but it isn’t as warm, especially when doors are closed.)

He learns from failure as well as success. You think of physical history as beginning with the caveman and continuing up to the present, but there have been other great scientific civilizations; some spoken of in legend, some completely unknown — all in your terms now vanished.

It seems to you that you have, perhaps, but one chance as a species to solve your problems, or be destroyed by your own aggression, by your own lack of understanding and spirituality. As you are given many lives in which to develop and fulfill your abilities, so has the species in those terms been allotted more than the single line of historical development with which you are presently acquainted. The reincarnational structure is but one facet in the whole picture of probabilities. In it you have literally as much time as you need, to develop those potentials that you must develop, before leaving the reincarnational existences. Groups of people in various cycles of reincarnational activity have met crisis after crisis, have come to your point of physical development and either gone beyond it, or destroyed their particular civilization.

In this case they were given another chance, having the unconscious knowledge not only of their failure, but the reasons behind it. They then began with a psychological head start as they formed new primitive groupings. Others, solving the problems, left your physical planet for other points in the physical universe. When they reached that level of development, however, they were spiritually and psychically mature, and were able to utilize energies of which you now have no practical knowledge.

Sound was utilized far more effectively, not only for healing and in wars, but also to power vehicles of locomotion, and to bring about the movement of physical matter. Sound was a conveyor of weight and mass.

The strength of this second civilization lay mainly in the areas now known as Africa and Australia, although at that time not only was the climate entirely different, but the land areas. There was a different attraction of land mass having to do with the altered position of the poles. Relatively speaking, however, the civilization was concentrated in area; it did not attempt to expand. It was highly ingrown and dwelled upon the planet simultaneously with a large, unorganized, dispersed, primitive culture.

Not only did it make no attempt to “civilize” the rest of the world, but it did everything in its power — which was considerable for a long period of time — to impede any such progress.

(9:42.) They were not interested in beginning from scratch again as an infant civilization, but in other areas. Therefore much of their knowledge was instinctive with them, and this particular group then went through what you would call the various technological stages very rapidly.

The energy, often in your time given over to violence, went instead into other pursuits, but began to turn against them. They were not learning to deal with violence or aggression. They were attempting to short-circuit it physically, and this they found had complications.

The Lumanians were a very thin, weakly people, physically speaking, but psychically either brilliant or completely ungifted. In some, you see, the built-in controls caused so many blockages of energy in all directions that even their naturally high telepathic abilities suffered.

Large groups, however, simply left their cities, destroyed the force fields that had enclosed them, and joined the many groups of relatively uncivilized peoples, mating with them and bearing children. These Lumanians died quickly, for they could not bear violence nor react to it violently. They felt however, that their mutant children might have a resulting disinclination toward violence, but without the prohibiting nerve-control reactions with which they were endowed.

These people, as remnants, really, of the first great civilization, always carried within themselves strong subconscious memories of their origin. I am speaking of the Lumanians now. This accounted for their quick rise, technologically speaking. But because their purpose was so single-minded — the avoidance of violence — rather, say, than the constructive peaceful development of creative potential, their experience was highly one-sided. They were driven by such a fear of violence that they dared not allow the physical system freedom even to express it.

(10:33.) The vitality of the civilization was therefore weak — not because violence did not exist, but because freedom of energy and expression was automatically blocked along specific lines, and from outside physically. They well understood the evils of violence in earthly terms, but they would have denied the individual’s right to learn this his own way, and thus prevented the individual from using his own methods, creatively, to turn the violence into constructive areas. Free will in this respect was discarded.

As a child is physically protected from some diseases for a while after he emerges from his mother’s womb, so for a brief period is the child cushioned against some psychic disasters for a short period after birth, and carries within him, still for his comfort, memories of past existences and places. So the Lumanians for some generations were supported by deep subconscious memories of the civilization that had gone before. Finally, however, these began to weaken. They had protected themselves against violence but not against fear.

They were, therefore, subject to all of the ordinary human fears which were then exaggerated, since physically they could not respond even to nature with violence. If attacked, they had to flee. The fight-or-flight principle did not apply. They had but one recourse.

In the period that you now think of as the Stone Age, the men you think of as your ancestors, the cavemen, often found shelter not in rough naturally formed caves, but in mechanically created channels that reached behind them, and in the deserted cities in which once the Lumanians dwelled. Some of the tools fashioned by the cavemen were distorted versions of those they had found.