“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.

This evening it was obvious that Jane really wanted to have the session, because she told me she was ready for it early. For a change we decided to do our thing in her writing room, or den, at the back of the house. She started out speaking for Seth very quietly, but her delivery soon became much more intent—then often louder and impassioned: Jane used many more gestures than usual, staring wide-eyed at me, leaning forward again and again in her rocker, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She was turned on in trance, wound up, her pace considerably faster than it’s been lately.)

(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.

I told Jane the session is brilliant, the best she’s ever given. I told her it raised many questions, but that I didn’t think anyone, at any time, had dealt better with the “origin” of our universe, our world, our history.

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?

I told Jane that as far as I know the unimaginable explosion of the primordial superdense state, or entity, that resulted in the formation of our universe had been a straightforward event: Once begun, it kept going. There hadn’t been any fluctuations or on-off states balancing between the physical and nonphysical, for example. Science currently postulates this theory as its “standard model” for the creation of the universe.³

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?