“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. (Long pause, one of many.) The universe will begin yesterday. The universe began tomorrow. Both of these statements are quite meaningless. The tenses are wrong, and perhaps your time sense is completely outraged. Yet the statement: “The universe began in some distant past,” is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.

The very experience of passing moments belongs to your psychological rooms in the same way that clocks are attached to your walls. Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe, they search for it in the past. The universe is being created now (underlined). Creation occurs in each moment, in your terms. The illusion of time itself is being created now. It is therefore somewhat futile to look for the origins of the universe by using a time scheme that is in itself, at the very least, highly relative.

Your now (underlined), or present moment, is a psychological platform. It seems that the universe began with an initial burst of energy of some kind (the “big bang”). Evolutionists cannot account for its cause. Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger dimension of reality, and that he created the universe while being himself outside of it. He set it into motion. Many individuals, following either persuasion, believe that regardless of its source, the [universe]¹ must run out of energy. Established science is quite certain that no energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed (as stated in the first law of thermodynamics). Science sees energy and matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under varying circumstances.

That is enough for now. End of session, and a fond good evening.

“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 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.