“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane was rather relaxed tonight—again—but decided to try for the session. She’s been reading the book on scientific creationism I suggested to her. Her feelings about it are both ambiguous and funny: “You’ve got to watch those guys,” she said more than once, meaning the creationists, “or they’ll lead you right where they want you to go. You’ve got to keep thinking. I can only read so many pages at a time….” Adding to the humor of the situation is the fact that we’ve had people write or say the same thing about the Seth material. But Jane didn’t mention any of those events.

Jane expected Seth to work on his new book this evening. “Yeah, I’ve got sentences about it in my head. I’m just waiting for him to put them in order,” she said as we sat for the session. Then, without calling his material Chapter 1, dictation, or whatever:)

The consciousness of each reader of this book existed before the universe was formed—in parentheses: (in your terms)—but that consciousness was unmanifest. Your closest approximation—and it is an approximation only—of the state of being that existed before the universe was formed is the dream state. (Long pause.) In that state before the beginning, your consciousness existed free of space and time, aware of immense probabilities. This is extremely difficult to verbalize, yet it is very important that such an attempt be made. (Long pause.) Your consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative process.

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.

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.)

2. “Rob wanted me to do a paragraph or so about my reactions to the book on scientific creationism that I’ve just finished reading,” Jane wrote, “so here goes. The book follows the idea that an objectified God made the universe (and the earth) in a perfect condition, and that instead of evolving toward more complicated forms, it’s running down; that decay and catastrophe are break-downs of previous better conditions, but that even these will finally be removed by the Creator after they have served their own special purposes. The book states that the universe is around 10,000 years old. (Seth has said more than once that in those terms it’s even older than the evolutionists believe.) The reasons given for this young age seem reasonable enough, though I hardly have the background knowledge to know how good they’d sound to an evolutionary geologist, say….

“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….

I was surprised after the session tonight when Jane said that she still wants to read the second of the two books on creationism I’d bought, not long before she began delivering Dreams for Seth.

3. I’ve known Seth planned to discuss evolution—that sensitized subject—ever since Jane tuned into the title of his new book a couple of months ago. However, my interest in one of my favorite fields of inquiry lay relatively dormant until Seth confirmed the title earlier this month (September); then I felt the impulse to jump right into producing notes on the subject. Better wait, I told myself and Jane, until we had an idea of how Seth is going to handle his own material on evolution.

I had finished Appendix 12 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality by August 1977. I’d devoted the piece to a study of the establishment theory of evolution versus ideas Seth, Jane, and I have on that theme, and noted that I’d accumulated much information from a number of sources. I’ve amassed much more data by now, of course. Perhaps, I thought when putting together the Preface for Dreams, I just wanted to use some of our later material in the new book.