“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must realize that the inner portions of the self are aware of the greater framework in which individuality takes place. Men will die for an ideal. A man will die to protect his children. If pure personal survival were all that mattered to the so-called subconscious, such acts would be impossible—and in fact, they would be inconceivable on man’s part. And the selfish gene has nothing to do with any of it (emphatically).

Excellent health is to be sought, it would certainly seem. Men have committed crimes in misguided searches for an ideal. Great acts of heroism have also resulted, however, and men, it seems, have spent themselves in following an ideal that they hoped to actualize for the rest of mankind. Why does the body not protest if men have nearly starved, or become the scorn of their fellows, or whatever? The answer is that as beneficial, as desirable, as good health is, and the performance of an excellent body, man’s pursuit of other kinds of accomplishment, his equally strong desire for knowledge, and his insatiable curiosity, his pursuit of the ideal, often lead him into pathways that result in the body’s difficulties.