“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There were languages then long before your earliest evidence of them, and in written form. Your civilization is organized around science and technology, and generally speaking, now, the arts and other schools of knowledge have been largely subsidiary. Long before the time of the Egyptians, now, there were sophisticated societies, utilizing some technologies and advanced in the arts of writing. But these civilizations were not organized around technology, so that the technological advances, while highly sophisticated, were not pursued with the same diligence as in your time, and they were considered novelties—playthings for the wealthy, advanced toys, but not considered in a serious light.

There were electric batteries (as we’ve read lately; see my files). There were airplanes (files). There was not a technological organization however as you know it, so that the technological achievements were considered somewhat in a fashion that your society now considers fine art—esthetic, to be collected by the wealthy, delightful, good for collectors but not particularly practical. The aura of the mind of man simply had a different cast.

Reading was generally accepted. Books were numerous, but reading was done in the daytime. Technology was considered a plaything. Airplanes were not generally used. They were novelties. People identified so with the earth, they could see no reason for fast travel. There were automobiles, again considered as fanciful, technological art.

There were “modern,” or highly sophisticated civilizations, utilizing some technology, long before the dates given for the invention of writing (about 3100 BC). Writing was invented and reinvented the art lost, then reemerging.

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.

(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. [...]

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. [...] (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.”)

(Pause.) A loving technology, again, would always add to the qualitative and spiritual deepening of experience. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) With the latest developments in medical technology, there are all kinds of heart operations that can be performed, even the use of heart transplants. In many cases, even when hearts are repaired through medical technology, the same trouble reoccurs at a later date, or the patient recovers only to fall prey to a different, nearly fatal or fatal, disease. [...]

THE BROKEN-HEARTED, THE HEARTLESS,
AND MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 4: “The Broken-Hearted, the Heartless, and Medical Technology.”

[...] These civilizations were highly technological; the second one being, in fact, far superior to your own along those lines.

[...] Therefore much of their knowledge was instinctive with them, and this particular group then went through what you would call the various technological stages very rapidly.

[...] Its technology was extremely activated, and propelled onward as it strove to develop, for example, artificial foods so that it would not need to kill for survival in any way.

[...] They did not allow technology to destroy them, however. [...]

(Slowly at 9:20:) There is nothing wrong with technology. Man has an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity. [...] Your technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree—but not entirely—been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment. Therefore, you end up with a technology that threatens to work no longer. [...]

For that reason, science—after its first great adventurous era—had its own flaws built in, and so it must expand its definitions of reality or become a tin-can caricature of itself, a prostituted handmaiden to an outworn technology, and quite give up its early claims of investigating the nature of truth or reality. [...]

Now: Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding—a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.

You are as empty, symbolically, open and vacant, as a newborn child, ready now only to partake of God’s pure foods, determined to avoid technology’s poisonous effects. [...] Oftentimes the previously withheld normal aggression now can be legitimately expressed—against the food companies, the technological environment, the medical profession, and so forth.

[...] In certain terms, now, some natural diets of five centuries ago could kill you today, though they lacked any technologically produced chemicals. [...]

You tell your body what to do with the food you eat—and when you are in a technological civilization, it is rather foolhardy to convince yourselves that your food is poisoned. [...]

Such attitudes may be part of your methods of learning, to show you that technology should only go so far. [...]

[...] In your world, technology is your art. It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe.

[...] The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo (1475–1564) could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements. [...]

[...] Technology has been responsible for the fact that so many people have been able to see the great paintings of the world, either directly or through reproductions—and more people are familiar with the works of the great masters than ever were in their lifetimes.

[...] Art largely ended up—in those terms, now—as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth. [...]

Now: Even in your terms of history and serial time, as a race you have tried various methods of dealing with the physical world.⁶ In this latest venture you are discovering that exterior manipulation is not enough, that technology alone is not “the answer.” Please understand me: There is nothing wrong with a loving technology.

[...] There were pictures drawn of cellular structures long before any technological methods of seeing them were available, in your terms.

[...] There are methods that can be used to discover how different species migrate, for example, and then to duplicate such feats technologically if you want to. [...]

[...] You pride yourselves on your technology, and the production of durable goods, buildings and roads, yet many of these are insignificant when compared to other structures within the “past.”

A true understanding of the way in which an idea becomes physical matter would result in a complete revamping of your so-called modern technology, and in buildings, roads, and other structures that would far outlast those you now have. [...]

In titling this chapter I used the word “mechanics,” because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. [...]

[...] As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. [...]

[...] The dream state serves as a rich source for the world’s knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology. This is a highly important point, for “the technological world out there” was at one time the world of dreams. [...]

Value fulfillment will always provide inner directions that remind man constantly of the best ways in which such technology can be used. [...]

[...] Had the human species gone into certain mental disciplines as thoroughly as it has explored technological disciplines, its practical transportation system would be vastly different, and yet by this time even more practical than it is now. [...]

[Many of] the flying saucer appearances come from [such] a plane, [one] that is much more advanced in technological sciences than earth at this time. [...]

[...] You feel you have no part in nature except as you exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology. [...]

[...] Through the geese I want to associate Jane’s and my activities with nature rather than technology, for in nature I sense a great, sublime, ultimate peacefulness and creativity that far surpasses technology, can we but ever manage to approach an understanding of what nature really means for us physical creatures. [...]

[...] At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.

Here, events are connected one to the other in a psychic webwork that is far more effective than your physical technological system of communication. [...] Knowledge is received and transmitted in electromagnetic patterns so that one pattern can carry far more units of information than anything you have, technologically speaking. [...]

[...] Medical technology alone, however expert, cannot really heal a broken heart, of course. [...]

(I’m not interested in knocking our technology, however, but in pointing out coexisting inner factors that I’m sure are just as important. After all, our technology is responsible for the very existence of this physical book, thereby making it possible for Seth, Jane, and me to communicate with many others.

[...] As in the Introductory Notes, I want to stress Jane’s role as the creative artist, disseminating her personal view of a larger inner reality, and her intuitive and conscious comprehension of at least some aspects of that reality; for such understanding can easily elude our Western-oriented, materialistic, technological outlook.

[...] They also are connected with the much larger social issues, such as the uses to which your nuclear technology will be put.

(9:34.) Instead, your natural creativity and your natural energies would some time ago have led you naturally (underlined) to a more productive use of nuclear force, to ways of rendering such use harmless in the short and long run, so that it could take its place in a loving technology. [...]

[...] Certainly technological development appears to have been built most securely upon a body of concrete ideas.

[...] Is the disaster the result of God’s vengeance?” A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?” He might try to dissociate himself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a nonpersonal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

(A note: According to Seth, the Lumanians were the second of a group of three highly technological civilizations that existed on our planet long before the time of Atlantis. [...]