“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A potpourri. Heredity plays far less a part in the so-called formation of character than is generally supposed.

For that matter, [the same is true of] environment, as it is usually understood. Your cultural beliefs predispose you to interpret experience in terms of heredity and environment, however, so that you focus primarily upon them as prime causes of behavior. This in turn results in much more structured experience than necessary. You do not concentrate upon the exceptions — the children who do not seem to fit the patterns of their families or environments, so of course no attempts are made to view those kinds of unofficial behavior.

The human personality is far more open to all kinds of stimuli than is supposed. If information is thought to come to the self only through physical means, then of course heredity and environment must be seen behind human motivation. When you realize that the personality can and does have access to other kinds of information than physical, then you must begin to wonder what effects those data have on the formation of character and individual growth. Children do already possess character at birth, and the entire probable intent of their lives exists then as surely as does the probable plan for the adult body they will later possess.

Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around, and the about-to-be-born infant is the agency that adds new material through the chromosomal structure.² The child is from birth far more aware of all kinds of physical events than is realized also. But beside that, the child uses the early years to explore — particularly in the dream state — other kinds of material that suit its own fancies and intents, and it constantly receives a stream of information that is not at all dependent upon its heredity or environment.

[...] The inner self adopts an ego in order to allow manipulation within the physical universe, and yet part of the ego is composed of portions from the inner self, while the bulk of the ego is allowed to develop through physical heredity and environment.

[...] In other words, though the ego was adopted originally by the inner self, and was a product of physical heredity and environment, it does not die; but its existence is changed from physical reality into electrical reality. [...]

[...] If you believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific instruments uncover the “faulty mechanism,” or whatever, and there is the evidence for all to see.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which he seemingly had little control. [...] He believed himself to be programmed by his heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.⁴

[...] He wanted to understand at one time the heredity of seeds and plants. [...]

[...] You face your first day upon the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.

[...] We have seen that the ego begins, sparked into being, by the inner self, greatly influenced by heredity and physical environment; and that this ego as it continues to exist gradually builds up an electrical reality of its own, as its experiences form into coded data within the cells.

Now: each person chooses his parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of various characteristics, attitudes and abilities from which he draws in physical life.

You are used to thinking in terms of heredity. [...]

For example: It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. [...]

[...] Everyone else forms their own physical reality but not me—my reality is caused by heredity or environment. [...]

[...] When your fate seems dependent upon heredity, for example, then the transmission of ideas and beliefs operates; these give signals to the chromosomes. [...]

[...] They were trying to discover the secret of heredity within plant life.

[...] Much of his material in that session applies here: “It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past….”

Now, there’s very recent discussion in medical circles that many cases of senility are caused by a “slow virus infection,” rather than just heredity or the traditional aging and oxygen starvation of the brain. [...]

[...] Only then could he examine it, you see, without qualm, and without being aware of the living voice that protested (Jane now spoke in a much louder and deeper voice temporarily); and so in his great fascination for what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand the heredity of a flower, say, he forgot what he could [also] learn by smelling a flower, looking at it, watching it be itself.

[...] Heredity springs from the great inherent unpredictability that is then broken down to specifications inside the chromosomes,⁹ no two of which are alike. [...]

[...] As I came out with that, I got something over here” — she gestured to her right, indicating one of the channels of information available from Seth — “about the unpredictability of consciousness, and precognition and heredity: the cell’s soul and the soul’s cell….”

[...] Your scientists write about heredity, buried and coded in the genes,⁶ blueprints for an identity not yet formed. [...]

[...] We have seen that the ego begins, sparked into being by the inner self, greatly influenced by heredity and physical environment; and that this ego, as it continues to exist, builds up an electrical reality of its own and forms its experiences … into the coded data within the cells.