“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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’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….

“In a magazine on parapsychology I recently read an article containing ideas that I think are at least a little more reasonable than those of creationism or evolutionism: Though the writer did take evolution for granted, he also put consciousness within matter.”

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?