“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I will purposely avoid using the word “God” because of the connotations placed upon it by conventional religion. I will make an attempt to explain the characteristics of this divine process throughout this book. I call the process “All That Is.” All That Is is so much a part of its creations that it is almost impossible to separate the “creator from the creations,” for each creation also carries indelibly within it the characteristics of its source.

I am not saying that the universe is the result of some “psychological machine,” either, but that each portion of consciousness is a part of All That Is, and that the universe falls together in a spontaneous, divine order (intently)—and that each portion of consciousness carries within it indelibly the knowledge of the whole.

But as I type this material two evenings later [on Friday], I can note that Jane didn’t paint at all. Instead she continued to work on her own God of Jane. She also finished reading the book on creationism, and at my request today wrote a page or so about her reactions to it. Her little essay is given as Note 2. Then see Note 3 for my own comments about evolution as I discussed that subject in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.)

“Maybe between one and two thousand years after the Creation a worldwide flood destroyed practically everything, though some species, including man, survived. (No even approximate date for the flood is given in the book. Noah, the 10th male in descent from Adam—Noah and his family, and the divine command he received to build the Ark—aren’t even mentioned. But how could they be, in a book on scientific creationism?) There was no evolution. All species were created as they now appear. Oddly, if you postulate a god in that fashion, a personified one, then you wonder why he couldn’t—or didn’t choose to—maintain the perfection of his original creation. Why man’s sin, resulting in the catastrophic flood, to which all species fell victim? The regular theory of evolution doesn’t have to contend with such questions, of course, but in the book I just read no explanations for questions like that are given—I don’t even remember that they were raised.

“I’d say that both the creation and evolution models suffer from logical and emotional sloppiness, and that neither one presents a reasonable view of man’s origins. Both concepts seem equally implausible when you think of them with any objectivity, and neither can be proven, of course. They ultimately rest upon the faith of the believer! I get a spooky feeling that I’ve had before, thinking that here we are, alive and conscious, technologically accomplished, and we really haven’t the slightest idea of where the universe came from or why we’re alive, though as a species we’re gifted with both intellect and intuition. At best our established concepts seem grossly insufficient. So Seth’s version of All That Is being both within and without the universe makes more sense to me, and I’m very curious about where he’ll go with this in his book. This morning, looking over the few pages we have so far, I got the idea that the title for the first chapter is going to be: ‘Before the Beginning’—so we’ll see….

Yet most of what I wrote in Appendix 12 is still valid, to my mind, even though I’ve always wanted to expand (and expound?) upon all of it. There are a few things I’d put somewhat differently now, given the advantage of a couple of years’ hindsight, but Jane and I don’t really want to revise the material. We’d rather let it stand as is, representing our best knowledge and feeling of that time, including the way we put to use Seth’s own information on the subject. If that “best knowledge” was groping and imperfect, then so be it. I think it most interesting that the theory of evolution is now challenged by those who, like Jane and I, simply want to know whether it has a basis in scientific fact; and that it’s also come under virulent attack by those who generally believe in fundamentalist religions. The controversy over whether evolution ever really happened—and/or is happening—is far from resolved, whether in scientific, religious, or lay terms.

But why, I asked Jane, haven’t our best minds—at least those who have operated throughout the centuries of our recorded history—been able to arrive at some sort of reasonable consensus about the “origin” of our universe (if it had one), its processes, and our human place in it? In their many forms religion and science haven’t provided satisfactory answers, nor have agnosticism or atheism. Why have so many human beings (an estimated 50 billion of them) had to exist along the way before we arrived at our present point—from which point we in our collective wisdom think we might begin to provide meaningful answers to such questions? If true, this proposition means that for all of that time, all of those people lived pretty useless lives as far as having any real understanding of their universe goes—hardly a natural situation, I told Jane. Life can’t really be that way. The whole set of questions must be meaningless in deeper terms.

So why do Jane and I think we’re on to something with the Seth material—that it can help if given the chance? Why haven’t others—our scientific, religious, and political leaders, or those in the fine arts, say—come up with ideas similar to those espoused by a Seth, and why aren’t those ideas common today? Seth’s kind of information must have surfaced innumerable times, I think, and for many reasons fallen short as broad coherent systems of thought. How would theology, or the sociology of science, answer any or all of these questions?