“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a manner of speaking, it can be said that you have reincarnational civilizations as well as reincarnating individuals. Each entity who is born in flesh works toward the development of those abilities that can be best nurtured and fulfilled within the physical environment. He has a responsibility to and for the civilization in which he has each existence, for he helps form it through his own thoughts, emotions, and actions.

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.

They were particularly concerned in the beginning with developing a human being who would have built-in safeguards against violence. With them, the desire for peace was almost what you would call an instinct. There were changes in the physical mechanism. When the mind signaled strong aggression, the body would not react. Now psychologically you can see vestiges of this in certain individuals, who will faint, or even attack their own physical system, before allowing themselves to do what they think of as violence to another.

An overly conscientious, restrictive mental and physical state evolved, in which the organism’s natural physical need for survival was in every way hampered. Mentally, the civilization progressed. Its technology was extremely activated, and propelled onward as it strove to develop, for example, artificial foods so that it would not need to kill for survival in any way.

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.