“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.

(9:31.) In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with the idea of an objectively created universe. Either God “made it,” or physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.

Instead, consciousness formed matter. As I have said before, each atom and molecule has its own consciousness. Consciousness and matter and energy are one, but consciousness initiates the transformation of energy into matter. In those terms, the “beginning” of your universe was a triumph in the expansion of consciousness, as it learned to translate itself into physical form. The universe emerged into actuality in the same way (underlined), but to a different degree, that any idea emerges from what you think of as subjectivity into physical expression.

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.

If you have thought that the universe followed a mechanistic model, then you would have to say that each portion of this “cosmic machine” created itself, knowing its position in the entire “future construction.” You would have to say further that each portion came gladly out of its own source individually, neatly tailored to its position, while at the same time that individual source was also as intimately the source of each other individual portion.

The birth of the world represented a divine psychological awakening. Each consciousness that takes a part in the physical universe dreamed of such a physical existence, in your terms, before the earth was formed. In greater terms than yours, it is quite true to say that the universe is not formed yet, or that the universe has vanished. In still vaster terms, however, the fact is that in one state or another the universe has always existed.

(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.”

“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 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.

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.