“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole is surely one of our oldest concepts, growing, in those terms, with us out of our prehistory as we struggled to grasp the “true” nature of reality. Traditionally we’ve cast that feeling or knowledge in religious terms, for want of a better framework, but I think that more and more now the search is also on within science for a theory—even a hypothesis—that will lock up our often subjective variables into what might be called a more human equivalent of the still-sought-for unified theory in physics. What are human beings, anyhow? From what Jane and I can gather (through our reading especially), at least some of the world’s leading scientists are becoming willing to contend with consciousness itself. (Including their own consciousnesses? I can’t help wondering!) Portions of the latest scientific literature I have on hand, particularly that produced by physicists, contain references that not long ago would have been branded as metaphysical, or even worse.

Some of our readers, sending us recent books and copies of articles written by scientists working on these subjects, have noted that it must be nice for Jane and me to have concepts that Seth has been discussing for years “corroborated” by the establishment (often we already had the material on file, by the way). But once again irony enters in on my part, for I’m afraid our answer is that in general science isn’t even aware of the existence of the Seth material, notwithstanding the letters of approval and/or encouragement we receive from individual scientists, representing a variety of disciplines. We feel no sense of corroboration. As I wrote to a fan just last week: “No matter what he or she may think of it personally, no reputable scientist is going to publicly espouse a belief in the Seth material. Certainly not career-wise. Not for a long time yet, in our opinion, and for many reasons.”

Whatever the initial course of action agreed to in just this probable reality by everyone involved, from whatever point in the “past,” in Framework 1 the participants have subjected it to an almost infinite variety of choices and modifications through the years: but always—always—within nature’s great structure, and accompanied by the utter freedom of each person concerned to accept, reject, abort, or change the whole affair from their individual perspective at any moment….

One of their common creations within the same time scheme was rheumatoid arthritis, of course, for Jane began to show her version of it some eight years before Marie died. That mutual illness obviously became a deeply charged subject for both of them. However, with that fine stubbornness I mentioned in the first essay, Jane never told Marie of her own affliction; since the two no longer saw each other, consciously Marie never knew. Both of us think she did know psychically, though. I even think that mother and daughter shared the same case of arthritis—there weren’t two separate instances of it.

Granted that our species’ best human understanding of “the mystery of life” and of the universe is exceedingly inadequate, still Jane and I do not think that nature is totally objective, indifferently cruel, or simply uncaring, as science would have us believe. (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. We are not dwarfed. How could we be? For if, as I wrote earlier, Jane and I agree with the ancient idea that “all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole,” we also think that in some fashion the whole is enclosed within each of its parts. Science calls the idea holonomy, but Seth has been saying the same thing for years without ever mentioning the word. Jane didn’t even know it.