“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

All That Is, before the beginning contained within itself the infinite thrust of all possible creations. All That Is possessed (pause) a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings, dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what?

(Pause at 9:31.) All That Is contained within itself the knowledge of all existences, with their infinite probabilities, and “as soon as” All That Is imagined those numberless circumstances, they existed in what I will call divine fact.

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.

(Pause at 9:57.) When that answer came, it involved previously unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All That Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible progeny to see what conditions were needed for this even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity. What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner realm? When All That Is, in your terms, put all of those conditions together it saw, of course, in a flash, the mental creation of those objective worlds that would be needed—and as it imagined those worlds, in your terms, they were physically created.

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.

“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.”

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?

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:

“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?

(I’ll add that Jane and I have received several thousand letters since the publication of Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. As best I can remember, however, not a single writer has mentioned the sleepwalkers—one of Seth’s most intriguing concepts.)