“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

So-called objective science gives you a picture, a model, that has served well enough in its own fashion, enabling you to travel to the moon, for example, and to advance in a technology that for a time you set your hearts upon. In the framework of objective science as it now exists, however, even the technology will come up against a stone wall. Even as a means, objective science is only helpful for a while, because it will constantly run up against deeper inner realities that are necessarily shunted aside and ignored simply because of its method and attitude.² No objective science or splendid technology alone will keep even one man or woman alive, for example, if that individual has decided to leave the flesh, or finds no joy in daily life.

(Pause.) A loving technology, again, would always add to the qualitative and spiritual deepening of experience. The inner order of existence and true science go together. The true scientist is not afraid of identifying with the reality he chooses to study. He knows that only then can he dare to begin to understand its nature. There are many unofficial scientists, true ones in that regard, unknown in this age. Many are quite ordinary people in exterior terms, with other professions. Yet it is no accident that greater discoveries are often made by “amateurs” — those who are relatively free from official dogmas, released from the pressure to get ahead in a given field — those whose creativity flows freely and naturally in those areas of their natural interest.

(9:42.) Give us a moment … Without an identification with the land, the planet and the seasons, all of your technology will not help you understand the earth, or even use it effectively, much less fully. Without an identification with the race as a whole, no technology can save the race. (Pause, during an intent delivery.) Unless man also identifies himself with the other kinds of life with which he shares the world, no technology will ever help him understand his experience. I am speaking in very practical terms. Gadgets will, ultimately, teach you nothing about the dimensions of your own consciousness. When you use them (biofeedback, for instance) even to attain alterations of consciousness, you are programming yourselves, stepping apart from yourselves.

Give us a moment … Such gadgets can be useful only if they show you that such alterations are naturally possible. Otherwise, with your ideas of applied science and technology, the gadgets will be the pivoting point, and the ideas of manipulation will be stressed. In other words, unless the ideas behind objective science are altered, then gadget-produced altered states will almost certainly be used to manipulate, rather than free, consciousness.

I am not making a prediction here. I am simply pointing out one probability that exists. There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet³ that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of stars — people who even foresaw “later” global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who journeyed to the moon, and who brought back data quite as “scientific” and pertinent. There were those who understood the “origin” of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships.⁴ Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated in journeys not only through time but through space. There are ancient maps drawn from a 200-mile-or-more vantage point — these meticulously completed on return from such journeys.

The behavior of electrons, for example, will elude your technological knowledge — for in deepest terms what you will “perceive” will be a facade, an appearance or illusion. So far, within the rules of the game, you have been able to make your “facts” about electrons work. To follow their multidimensional activity however is another matter — (humorously:) a pun — and you need, if you will forgive me, a speedier means.

2. Seth’s material about technology and science leading to inner realities reminds me of two related examples that I’ve become aware of recently through my own reading. The first one involves a more intimate inner reality than the second, yet both pose interesting questions. Each reader can probably give similar illustrations. (However, as I wrote in Appendix 1, “I’m not interested in knocking our technology, but in pointing out coexisting inner factors that I’m sure are just as important.”)

My first example concerns the development of biofeedback machines in the 1960’s. With one of these devices the individual was to learn to control, when necessary, his or her own blood pressure, or any of certain other involuntary body functions. Doubtlessly such self monitoring is an example of the “loving technology” that Seth mentioned in his final delivery for the last Session; yet we now understand that the early claims for biofeedback were considerably exaggerated. Within a more reasonable context the technique will take its place in our medical systems, but in each case what we learn will surely point up the need to understand our individual inner realities; i.e., what caused the high blood pressure, or whatever, in the first place?

See Chapter 15 of Seth Speaks for Seth’s material on the art and technology of the ancient civilization of Lumina (as well as his references to those that came before and after it). Even now, he tells us, the Lumanians’ attributes are incorporated in our own heritage.