“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:02.) Give us a moment … So-called future developments of your species are now dependent upon your ideas and beliefs. This applies genetically in personal terms. For instance, if you believe that you can live to a healthy and happy old age, well into your nineties, then even in Western civilization you will do so. Your emotional intent and your belief will direct the functioning of your cells and (emphatically) bring out in them those properties and inherent abilities that will ensure such a condition. There are groups of people in isolated places who hold such beliefs, and in all such cases the body responds. The same applies to the race — or the species, to be more exact. There is an inexhaustible creativity within the cells themselves, that you are not using as a species because your beliefs lag so far behind your innate biological spirituality and wisdom. Your ideas are beginning to change. But unless you alter your framework you will continue to emphasize medical and technological manipulation. Period. In isolated cases this will show you some of the results possible on a physical basis alone. However, such techniques will not work in mass terms, or allow you, say, to prolong effective, productive life unless you change your beliefs in other areas also, and learn the inner dynamics of the psyche.

Give us a moment … Historically, of course, you follow a one-line pattern of thought, so you see a picture in which fish left the oceans and became reptiles; from these mammals eventually appeared, and apes and men. That is, I admit, a simple statement, but it is the way most people think evolution occurred. The terms of “progression” are tricky. You never imagine the situation being reversed, for example. Few of you ever imagine a conscious reptilian man. It seems to you that the direction you took is the only direction that could have been taken.

(One of the events we’ve been preparing for is the visit tomorrow of Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, Inc. He plans to attend ESP class tomorrow night, then stay over Wednesday to read and discuss the two works Jane has in progress, Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology, and “Unknown” Reality. Tam will also look at my first rough sketches for Jane’s book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time.¹ Then on Wednesday night he’ll witness the scheduled 706th session. If Seth comes through with material for “Unknown” Reality, Tam will be the first “outsider” to sit in on a session for this work. Almost always Jane dictates book material without witnesses other than myself and uses the framework of ESP class for emotional interactions involving herself, Seth, and others. That rather formal division in her trance activities suits us well; we enjoy doing most of our work by ourselves, no matter what kind it may be.

Give us a moment … In a way you are all your own mutants, creatively altering cellular formations. Period. When your fate seems dependent upon heredity, for example, then the transmission of ideas and beliefs operates; these give signals to the chromosomes. They cause miniature self-images, so to speak, that are mirrored in the cells. In many cases these images can be altered, but not with the technology that you have.

[...] If we truly owe our physical existence to the chance conglomeration of certain atoms and molecules in the thickening scum of a primordial pond or ocean [to discuss only mankind here], then certainly we’ll never come this way again in the universe; and moreover, our emotional and intellectual attributes must rest upon the same dubious beginning. Aside from the lack of evidence to back up such “scientific” speculations, what thinking or feeling values, I wonder, can make such a belief system so attractive? [...] To imagine that such an entire environment is an accident is intellectually outrageous and emotionally sterile.”

[...] Once it’s created, each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals.

So when you think of your beliefs and who you are, you must also think of your species, and how you are told your species came to be. For your private beliefs are also based upon those theories, and the beliefs, culturally, of your times.

[...] For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.