“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Saturday night, Jane and I presided over a “class” reminiscent of the weekly ESP classes we used to hold in our downtown apartments before we moved to the hill house, just outside Elmira, in 1975. A large group of former students attended from New York City, as well as some from the local area. The evening was a great success. Since each person knew everyone else so well, the verbal exchanges were many and often blindingly rapid. They were also hilarious: I laughed so often and so hard that my stomach ended up hurting. My voice was gone by the end of the meeting [and the next day it was still very hoarse]. Seth came through again and again, as he’d often done in class, and Jane thoroughly enjoyed herself. We’re to get transcripts of the several tapes made.

So beside this spontaneous creation, this simultaneous “stream” of divine rousing, All That Is began to watch the interactions that occurred among his own subjective progeny. (Pause.) He listened, began to respond and to answer a thought or a dream. He began to purposefully bring about those mental conditions that were requested by these generations of mental progeny. If he had been lonely before, he was no longer.

Your language causes some difficulty here, so please accept the pronoun “he” as innocuously as possible. “It” sounds too neutral for my purpose, and I want to reserve the pronoun “she” for some later differentiations. In basic terms, of course, All That Is is quite beyond any designations having to do with any one species or sex. All That Is, then, began to feel a growing sense of pressure as it¹ realized that its own ever-multiplying thoughts and dreams themselves yearned to enjoy those greater gifts of creativity with which they were innately endowed.

(10:23. Seth’s call for a break was abrupt. “Is one of the cats out?” Jane asked right away, looking around. Billy, our eight-month-old tiger cat, was sleeping on a chair near us. A couple of minutes ago he’d started making some odd high-pitched sounds I hadn’t heard him produce before. I’d wondered if those noises might bother Jane in trance—and they had. I didn’t know where Billy’s littermate Mitzi was, though. I found her locked out on the screened-in front porch.

But I had to admit that I was also surprised. Seth had come through so rapidly and emphatically that while taking notes I’d hardly had time to think about questions. What’s he trying to do, I asked Jane—combine something like science’s theoretical “big-bang” origin of the universe, all of those billions of years ago, with creationism’s theory of a recent spontaneous, divine creation of that same universe? Has our earth and all of its creatures “evolved,” or not? Could you have simultaneous evolution? [Here we go again, I speculated, back to struggling with that contradictory notion of “simultaneous time.”] How does Seth’s instantaneous “beginning processes that formed the universe”—with no time involved—square with fossils in the earth? Isn’t he saying that the universe grew/evolved through a series of dream states?

1. Seth was evidently experimenting here, for right away he went back to using “it,” instead of “he,” when referring to All That Is. “It” may not be entirely satisfactory either, but Jane and I didn’t question Seth about it: We prefer that designation because it encompasses any kind of sexual orientation and/or function within All That Is. (When Seth used “he” while talking about All That Is a couple of times later in the session, I substituted “it” in my notes and let it go at that.)

2. Seth first discussed the “sleepwalkers” in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality—see Session 708 for September 30, 1974. Here’s a much-condensed version of what he told us that night after break ended at 9:56:

In “Unknown” Reality, then, Seth’s material on the sleepwalkers heralded one of the main themes of Dreams, which he began five years later. Dreams was unsuspected by us then, of course; so what books to come will have their genesis in this one?

From my reading of Seth’s ideas of “in the beginning,” however, I’m sure he couldn’t agree with either the big-bang or inflationary models of the creation of the universe, even though his material may be evocative of portions of both theories. In physics, we’re asked to believe that this “extremely dense state” which began to expand was in actuality many billions of times smaller than a proton. (Protons are subatomic components of the nuclei of atoms.) Matter is a form of energy. Even so, I have trouble conceptualizing the idea that all matter in our universe, out to the farthest-away galaxy of billions of stars, grew from this unimaginably small and dense, unimaginably hot “original” state or area of being. I can see how such a concept can be postulated mathematically—but could it ever have really happened in ordinary terms?