“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.

However, aside from being in outright conflict with the theory of evolution [and the idea of an ancient universe], the beliefs of the creationists do pose a number of questions that are quite intriguing from our joint viewpoint. My statement doesn’t mean that Jane and I endorse creationism just because we question the doctrines of evolution. We think that either one of those belief systems is much too inadequate to explain reality in any sort of comprehensive way.

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:)

(10:02 P.M. “That was short, but I don’t care,” Jane said right after coming out of her trance state. “I thought that was what there was tonight. I never stop when there’s more, like you’d turn off a faucet.”

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.)

1. Originally Jane said “world” here, where I’m sure Seth wanted her to say “universe.” Anytime I make such a change in Seth’s copy, or insert a clarifying word or phrase as though it came from him, or might have, the alteration is in brackets [like this]. Occasionally Jane or I may recast a sentence of Seth’s, but this isn’t necessary even once per session. Our rule is that otherwise we do not change or delete any of his material without noting it.

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….

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.

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?