“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.)

Now: You cannot prove scientifically that [your] world was created (pause) by a god who set it into motion, but remained outside of its dominion. Nor can you prove scientifically that the creation of the world was the result of a chance occurrence—so you will not be able to prove what I am going to tell you either. Not in usual terms.

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.

All That Is knew of itself only. It was engrossed with its own subjective experiences, even divinely astonished as its own thoughts and imaginings attained their own vitality, and inherited the creativity of their subjective creator. [Those thoughts and imaginings] began to have a dialogue with their “Maker” (all very emphatically).

Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts—and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to respond to these “generations” of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also. There was no time, so all of this “was happening” simultaneously. The order of events is being simplified. In the meantime, then, in your terms, All That Is spontaneously thought new thoughts and dreamed new dreams, and became involved in new imaginings—and all of these also related to those now-infinite generations of interweaving and interrelating thoughts and dreams that “already” existed (with many gestures and much emphasis).

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.

Divine subjectivity is indeed infinite. It can never be entirely objectified. When the worlds, yours and others, were thus created, there was indeed an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity.

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).

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.

You had the sleepwalkers,² early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms.

(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.

All of the species began by emphasizing a great subjective orientation that was most necessary as they learned to manipulate within the new physical environment.

(Jane paused, eyes closed. Mitzi was still loving me up. Then:)

“I’ll tell you,” Jane said, “I was getting more. It was fun to do, and I knew what was coming, but going back like that I couldn’t get it.”

“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?

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.)

“They were not asleep to themselves, only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli. This is the other side of your own experience. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. In what you would call the physical waking state, these individuals slept, yet they behaved with great natural physical grace. They did not saddle the body with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. They did not age to the extent that you do.”

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?

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?