“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This of course involves considerations of race, and you must realize that your present race is the one into which you were born, in your terms, in this place and time. Each of you have been members of different races, and so each of you have shared in both the advantages and ignominies attached, in historic terms, to such conditions of birth.

This is not the place for me to go into a long discussion concerning the significance of races, yet each one is highly meaningful, and represents a different aspect of humanity as a whole. Therefore, each race has a symbolic meaning to mankind’s psyche. The outside experience and structure of any given race’s experience may change, but the inner symbolism will still remain, and be creatively grappled with.

Your daily experience will be affected by your race, your beliefs about it, your beliefs about other races, and the climate of opinion in general. On a quite simple basis, if you consider God in human terms you will project him as belonging to your own race. If you belong to a minority or if you are black, then you may be caught in a conflict of beliefs.

It is impossible to separate your daily experience in any of its aspects from your beliefs and those judgments that you place upon them. The beliefs boil down to your ideas of right and wrong, and they involve all of your attitudes concerning illness and health, wealth and poverty, the relationships of the races, religious conflicts, and more important, your intimate day-by-day psychological reality.

Those seeds form the physical races, which are all variations on a theme, or as Ruburt would say, eccentricities² of an everchanging model. You accept the fact that there are biological connections in terms of family, country, and race, between yourselves and the other individuals on your planet. The species divides itself up, so to speak, and the members of the different races at any given time distribute themselves in the various lands and continents. [...] You say: “This race is thus and so, and we can trace its history through the ages.”* Or: “That race initiated language.” Generally speaking, you see certain races as having their own characteristics. [...] No one, however, feels less a person because of not being in a race by himself or herself.

Psychically, you are made up of counterparts, as physically you come from various races. There are far more counterpart groupings than there are races, but then your definition of races is arbitrary. [...] Basically, however, counterparts deal with fulfillments and developments that transcend races or countries.

[...] That greater personhood gives birth to many “psychic children,” who then become physical by being born into the races of men and women.

[...] Large groupings and regroupings occur within the mass psyche, huge waves of energy as the race makes important decisions. [...]

[...] You become extremely engrossed in the activity, but you also know in deeper layers of your personality that your existence and the existence of the race will continue.

[...] Or you imagine the race of man vanishing, or starting all over again as it were from scratch.

[...] You must also realize the advantages, challenges and peculiar beauties that your own system provides, and that many of your accomplishments as a race are unique.

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. [...]

(Before the session this evening I spent some time blowing off steam about a variety of large issues that we see reflected in our daily news media—such things as corruption, pollution, inflation, the destiny of the race if it persists in its present ways, etc. [...]

[...] There is some compensation, and the race knows this. [...]

The race also realizes well the advantages and disadvantages of the physical reality it has adopted. [...]

In this value system the black races are feared, as, basically, the aged are feared. [...]

In your society therefore the black race has represented what you think of as the chaotic, primitive, spontaneous, savage, unconscious portions of the self, the underside of the “proper American citizen.”

[...] There was always a great fear that the blacks as a race would escape their bounds — given an inch they would take a yard — simply because the whites so greatly feared the nature of the inner self, and recognized the power that they tried so desperately to strangle within themselves.

[...] In larger terms, of course, each has belonged to other races in other times and places; or to be more accurate, in simultaneous existences one plays out the other’s role.

[...] The race tries to improve the quality of its experience through probing different kinds of probabilities. In a way each individual tries a different course for himself and for the race as a whole.

[...] In those terms you have barely begun to pass through the state of New York in the mental journey the race has begun. [...]

When the race began physical focus it learned to behave in a more or less permanent-appearing environment, and so it developed a suitable self that also appeared to be permanent enough for a time within that world.

You do not understand how revolutionary the concept is, and yet it is the only concept that will enable the race not only to fulfill its potential, but to continue its existence.

[...] The races are alive together at any given time on your earth in varying proportions, so there are physical organizations, biologically speaking, that you recognize. You do not feel threatened because you do not have your particular race to yourself. So there are inner psychic “races” to which you belong, or psychic stocks, so to speak, each providing physical variations.⁹

(Intently:) As certain races possess their own characteristics and shared biological background, and come from the same biological pool, however, so these counterparts come from the same psychic pool, and physically seed the members of the races at any given “time.” [...]

Now: You are each members of a particular race, and you do not feel any the less individualistic because of that affiliation.

[...] There are psychic pools of identity, therefore; and generally speaking those alive in any given century are as much a part of that inner pool as they are a part of the particular race to which they may belong. [...]

[...] Great artists by their very works demonstrate other attributes latent in the race as a whole. [...] Within the experience of your race as you know it lie all the patterns that would point to some fully developed human being, in which all inherent tendencies were given full play and came to fruition.

You would have an individual who displayed within himself [or herself] all of those great abilities known to the race, fulfilled according to his own unique temper — the artist, mathematician, athlete, the inventor — all the extraordinary qualities of creaturedom; the emotional realities would be used to their capacity, and any of the racial qualities or characteristics of the species would be given their complete freedom.

[...] The rock-music program was interrupted by an announcement having to do with the Indianapolis speed-car racing exhibition (the 57th Indianapolis 500-mile race). One driver had already been severely injured (on Monday); and the race, put off on that account, and because of inclement weather (on Tuesday), finally began today.

[...] The victim was connected with the race, however.

No one begins a race with a handicap, you may say, but that is obviously not the case. [...]

[...] To do this you must understand, again, that man must move beyond the concepts of one god, one self, one body, one world, as these ideas are currently understood.⁵ You are now poised, in your terms, upon a threshold from which the race can go many ways. [...] Developed, they can immeasurably enrich the race, and bring it to levels of spiritual and psychic and physical fulfillment. If some changes are not made, the race as such will not endure.

(11:26.) This does not mean that you will not endure, or that in another probability the race will not — but that in your terms of historical sequence, the race will not endure.

[...] A few great men have glimpsed those abilities, comma, and their love of the race and their integrity had caused them to trigger the unused portions of the brain.² In their way they sensed the great probable future and its ramifications.

[...] You will literally see only what you want to see.² If the race believed that space travel was impossible, you would not have it. [...] Often at your particular stage of development as a race, these appear first in your world as fiction, art, or so-called pure theory.

[...] If a portion of the race is hurt it may take a while before “you” feel the pain, but the entire unconscious mechanism of the species will try to heal the wound. [...]

The race suffers when any of its members die of starvation or disease, even as a whole plant suffers if a group of its leaves are “unhappy.” [...]

(Pause at 9:34.) The actions that arise out of the chanting—as the circle arrangement of students—these are all deeply buried psychically and psychologically pertinent actions that have been a part of your race from its earliest times. The chanting and the action are physical keys or symbols that open up the doors to a nonphysical state of existence before those of your race entered history. [...]

[...] While the chants are indeed seeped in ancient knowledge inherent in the race, the knowledge itself when intuitively felt brings forth an experience of timelessness. [...]

[...] Eve, rather than Adam, for example, eats of the apple first because it was the intuitive elements of the race, portrayed in the story as female, that would bring about this initiation; only afterward could the ego, symbolized by Adam, attain its new birth and its necessary alienation. [...]

[...] The woman being created from his rib symbolized the necessary emergence, even from the new creature, of the intuitive forces that will always come forth — for without that development the race would not have attained self-consciousness in your terms.

[...] In some such cases, all of the desirable human attributes are magnified and projected outward into a god or superconsciousness, while all the less admirable characteristics are left to the race and the individual.

[...] He does not consider it his own, and is astounded when any others of his race display such superior qualities.

Any event that you would consider disastrous to your race, brought about by the race itself, would be used in another probable system to avoid the same sort of error. There are disasters and dead end roads that your race has avoided completely, because in other systems of reality the lessons were learned and learned well.

The consciousnesses that have made up your race gain valuable experience. [...]

[...] Other probable earths and other probable races of mankind coexist, and you are apart of these also. [...]

[...] The race has called out before for help, and received it.

When you think you hate the race most, you are actually caught in a dilemma of love. You are comparing the race to your loving idealized conception of it. [...]

[...] Your affection has fallen short of itself in your experience because you have denied the impact of this emotion, for fear that the beloved — in this case the race as a whole — will not measure up to it. [...] If, instead, you allowed yourself to free the feeling of love that is actually behind your dissatisfaction, then it alone would allow you to see the loving characteristics in the race that now escape your observation to a large degree.

[...] All of this is based upon your idealized concept of what the race should be — your love for your fellow man, in other words. [...]

In a certain way the Christ personality was a manifestation of the evolution of consciousness, leading the race beyond the violent concepts of the times, and altering behavior that had prevailed to that time.

[...] We want you to realize that though it is hard for us to communicate, we spoke with your race before your race learned language. [...]

Individuals feeling this way will be very uncomfortable when they mingle with others of a different race, creed or color, and despite themselves may be revengefully conservative in dealing, for example, with problems of a community nature. [...]

[...] However, they may then use that concept to justify their belief in the inferiority of other races. [...]

[...] Youth and old age both have their place, and within the framework of your race each play important roles.

[...] This era could be more advantageous to the individual and to the race than any other period, were it recognized for what it is and understood.

[...] (Long pause.) The human race is a stage through which various forms of consciousness travel. The ideals keep the race pointed in beneficial directions. [...]

When you leave the physical system after reincarnations, you have learned the lessons, and you are literally no longer a member of the human race in those terms, for you elect to leave it. [...]

[...] Suppose the worst, that in this life you have the following background: You are poor, you are of a minority race, you are not intellectual, you are a woman, you have a severe physical defect and you are no beauty. [...]

(Jim H.: “Didn’t you say earlier, referring to the woman who was born in a minority race, that her challenges had been set up by a previous personality, in our terms?”)

[...] At the same “time,” so to speak, that this personality is born into a minority race, in a completely different era it may be born rich, secure and aristocratic. [...]

(A one-minute pause at 11:20.) While you were so concerned with protecting what you thought of as the boundaries and integrity of one selfhood, as a race you actually arrived at a point where you were beginning to deny your own greater reality. But all of this is part of the experiment upon which the race embarked in your probability.

The race was dealing with the creation of a new world of physical experience. [...]

It would have been quite possible for you as a race to have chosen any other “series” of neurological pulses, or messages, as the “real” ones, and to structure your experience along different lines. [...]

[...] In historic terms, early man, using here your theories about the race — early man — was in intimate contact with his family, clan, or tribe. [...]