“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You live your lives through your own subjective knowing, to begin with, and I will try to arouse within your own consciousnesses memories of events with which your own inner psyches were intimately involved as the world was formed—and though these may appear to be past events, they are even now occurring.

Before the beginning of the universe, we will postulate the existence of an omnipotent, creative source. (Pause.) We will hope to show that this divine subjectivity is as present in the world of your experience as it was before the beginning of the universe. Again, I refer to this original subjectivity as All That Is. I am making an attempt to verbalize concepts that almost defy the edges of the intellect, unless that intellect is thoroughly reinforced by the intuition’s strength. So you will need to use your mind and your own intuitions as you read this book.

The experience, the subjective universe, the “mind” of All That Is, was so brilliant, so distinct, that All That Is almost became lost, mentally wandering within this ever-flourishing, ever-growing interior landscape. Each thought, feeling, dream, or mood was itself indelibly marked with all of the attributes of this infinite subjectivity. Each glowed and quivered with its own creativity, its own desire to create as it had been created.

Before the beginning there existed an interior universe that had no beginning or ending, for I am using the term “before the beginning” to make matters easier for you to assimilate. In parentheses: (That same infinite interior universe exists now, for example.)

It is very difficult to try to assign anything like human motivation to All That Is. I can only say that it is possessed by “the need” to lovingly create from its own being; to lovingly transform its own reality in such a way that each most slight probable consciousness can come to be (long pause); and with the need to see that any and all possible orchestrations of consciousness have the chance to emerge, to perceive and to love.

All That Is, then, became aware of a kind of creative tumult as each of its superlative thoughts and dreams, moods and feelings, strained at the very edges of their beings, looking for some then-unknown, undiscovered, as of then unthought-of release. I am saying that this mental progeny included all of the consciousnesses that [have] ever appeared or will appear upon your earth—all tenderly couched: the first human being, the first insect—each with an inner knowledge of the possibilities of its development. All That Is, loving its own progeny, sought within itself the answer to this divine dilemma (all very intently, with eyes wide and dark, and with numerous gestures).

[All That Is] did not separate itself from those worlds, however, for they were created from its thoughts, and each one has divine content. The worlds are all created by that divine content, so that while they are on the one hand exterior, they are on the other also made of divine stuff, and each hypothetical point in your universe (pause) is in direct contact with All That Is in the most basic terms. The knowledge of the whole is within all of its parts—and yet All That Is is more than its parts.

The first “object” was an almost unendurable mass, though it had no weight, and it exploded, instantaneously beginning processes that formed the universe—but no time was involved. The process that you might imagine took up eons occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the initial objective materialization of the massive thought of All That Is burst into reality. In your terms this was a physical explosion—but in the terms of the consciousnesses involved in that breakthrough, this was experienced as a triumphant “first” inspirational frenzy, a breakthrough into another kind of being (most intently).

The earth then appeared as consciousness transformed itself into the many facets of nature. The atoms and molecules were alive, aware—they were no longer simply a part of a divine syntax, but they spoke themselves through the very nature of their being (gesturing). They became the living, aware vowels and syllables through which consciousness could form matter.

But in your terms this was still largely a dream world, though it was fully fashioned. It had, generally speaking, all of the species that you now know. These all correlated with the multitudinous kinds of consciousnesses that had clamored for release, and those consciousnesses were spontaneously endowed by All That Is with those forms that fit their requirements. You had the birth of individualized consciousness as you think of it into physical context. Those consciousnesses were individualized before the beginning, but not manifest. But individualized consciousness was not quite all that bold. It did not attach itself completely to its earthly forms at the start, but rested often within its “ancient” divine heritage. In your terms, it is as if the earth and all of its creatures were partially dreaming, and not as focused within physical reality as they are now.

(10:08.) For one thing, while individualized consciousness was within the massive subjectivity of All That Is, it enjoyed, beside its own uniqueness, a feeling of supporting unity, a comforting knowledge that it was one with its source. So in the beginning of [your] world, consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing gently at the start, but not quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem.

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.

“I got some of it before the session—about the initial ones before the earth was formed—you could call them nonphysical entities. But it sounds dumb when you say it now: Physical entities couldn’t hold all that much consciousness. I didn’t know it was that definite until the end of the session, though…. Boy, that was a really good state,” she said with satisfaction. “I really enjoyed it….”

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

So how do Seth’s own ideas of probable universes and probable earths fit in with his material tonight—as I’m sure they do? I quickly saw that my questions could go on and on. Seth’s book is young, I told myself. Wait. Wait….

“Imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not diseased or defective, but without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that you have. The sleepwalkers’ physical abilities surpassed yours. They were as agile as animals, their purpose simply to be. Their main points of consciousness were elsewhere, their primary focuses scarcely aware of the bodies they had created. Yet they learned ‘through experience,’ and began to ‘awaken,’ to become aware of themselves, to discover time, or to create it.

3. Theoretical physicists have charted (assuming that the big-bang origin of the universe was a hot event) how the first explosion may have “evolved” from one with a temperature well in excess of 100,000 million degrees Kelvin into a cooler one of “only” a few thousand degrees Kelvin around 500,000 years later, so that atoms could begin to form. Jane has heard of this standard model, of course, but knows little about its supposed details.

In ordinary terms, she knows practically nothing concerning several other less prominent theories regarding the beginning of the universe. I haven’t discussed these with her. One of them is the “inflationary model,” which may become much better known. It incorporates many of the features of the big-bang theory, and actually may answer certain questions in a better scientific fashion. One of the big differences between the two is that in the big-bang theory all of the matter in the universe was already present, though existing in an extremely dense state which then began to expand; the inflationary model suggests that the universe was created out of nothing, or out of just about nothing—meaning that through unforeseeable rhythms subatomic particles spontaneously came into being, with sufficient energy behind them to enable them to persist as matter. A fantastic, inflationary expansion then began. Yet this creation of matter out of nothing, so to speak, violates at least some of the laws of conservation—laws that are indeed among the most basic and cherished tenets of physics.

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?