“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned. Such people are not considered retarded, of course. I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both were immeasurably enhanced.

The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement. Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically. Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society. The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand.

A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded. I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values.

Other people may be sophisticated, brilliantly aware of their own feelings and those of other people, intuitively knowledgeable in the handling of relationships, even, as adults, exquisite parents—yet they may be labeled as retarded if they do not live up to certain artificial intellectual standards. They are actually in the same position at the other end as the people mentioned earlier.

In many cases it is the family, rather than the incapacitated member, who questions and does not understand — as in cases of severely mentally retarded children, for example. [...]

Highly intelligent parents, therefore, may find themselves with a retarded child. [...]

[...] But in the meantime they make the body sluggish and retard conscious concentration. [...]

(9:52.) There are mental conditions also: the so-called retarded people who do not use their reasoning minds as others do. [...]

The [retarded] son represented the result of two main conditions. [...]

(I have a few boyhood memories of Ella’s retarded son, also named Jay. [...]

Many children, for that matter, who are regarded as retarded by their teachers, are instead highly gifted. [...]

[...] Indeed, I seldom see consciousness mentioned in connection with genetics, except as its quality may relate to genetic “defects” like mental retardation, say.

[...] Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. [...]

([Gert:] “Are you saying that by the incident I am still retarded?”)

There are no gradations as far as above or below, or better or worse, or advanced or retarded as far as the various planes are concerned, but the planes themselves are grouped into certain organized patterns of development, and in a way I cannot as yet explain to you there seems to be certain kinds of gradation in these groupings.