“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is a part of man that Knows, with a capital K. That is the portion of him, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body’s “machinery,” ⁶ so in our book we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people write, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material—and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. (Pause.) In a fashion, creative play is your human version of far greater characteristics from which your universe itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific, subjective evidence for the nature of your own reality—evidence that is readily apparent once you really begin to look for it, particularly by comparing the world of your dreams with your daily life.

However, for every scientist bold enough to think this way, there are scores of others who vehemently disagree. For most scientific materialists only physical matter is real. For them consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon, the passive by-product of the brain’s physiology and chemical events. They believe that physical death is the end of everything, that ultimately all is pointless. They derisively call their rebellious colleagues “animists”—those who believe that all life forms and natural phenomena have a spiritual origin independent of physical matter. (Such heretics are also called “vitalists,” a term related to animism, and one which also has a long history of scientific contempt behind it.)

“There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning. That belief may well be a biological imperative. If we were as science maintains—only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos—then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?