“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Not only this, but even if the race as you know it distorts itself beyond belief, or even destroys itself, the many will not forget. The knowledge, hard won, would be as instinct when the race began again. The losers then would become stern teachers, having learned through experience.

There are various levels all operating, various levels of consciousness and identity. They cannot be forcibly restrained, for they would learn nothing. What they do learn however is always retained. This does not mean that each succeeding earth experiment will be made up of selves who have been through these cycles.

Now some of those within your reality are having their first experience with an ego as you think of it. Others are returning to it, the system, in an effort to learn more. There are guardians, so to speak, within your system, reincarnated for the last time to help keep it in some kind of order while the others mature. There are also some, not physical, who keep an eye out over the whole proceedings.

Now. Those within the system know this. Regardless of what you may think of their present performance at any given “time” in quotes, it is from this system that the greatest potentials emerge; for having dealt with it, consciousness undergoes one of the severest tests in learning to handle its own energy.

The horror and the results of mismanagement, and the vulnerability, are the teaching methods that each consciousness has accepted before entering your system. There is no way out but to learn or to ruin the entire system. In no other field of reality are the terms so drastic. For this reason the inner self withholds much of its knowledge. There must be no leaning upon the very basic fact that behind and within the system there is relief. You must believe in the physical reality and accept the vulnerability.

Now, from your system spring some of the most advanced of all identities. They go on and learn from other realities, granted, but yours is the hardest to manage, and those who accept it go off into a certain line of development where the potentials are beyond anything of which you can presently conceive.

First, quite simply, there are many who do not see those failings and shortcomings and trends of which you spoke earlier. They cannot be told; they learn. Now alone they would not be permitted to destroy an entire reality. The mixture of consciousness within your system gives some control. The child must mature, and your system is a maturing ground, a very primary one. A beginning school for those who are trying out for particular kinds of experience. Some simply will not succeed. They will continue instead along other lines of development.

Now, you have quite literally put in your time, for centuries. (Humorously.) This is one of the reasons that you find yourself very impatient with the development of your fellows, who have not had that advantage as yet. You have learned. You cannot understand why they have not.

They have to learn to handle it constructively. Now cooperation is an innate feature to these entering selves. Without it they could not survive long enough to learn anything. The warlike periods do not begin until this group achieves some ability at manipulation. Now while it seems to you that there has been little advance, there has indeed in the overall. Larger masses of individuals than ever before in this cycle realize that killing is wrong.