“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’ve held only three private, or deleted, sessions since Seth came through with the last regular one [the 885th] almost six weeks ago. I just wish I could present those sessions here, for in them Seth gave us much valuable information—not only about ourselves [including Jane’s somewhat impaired physical condition, her “stiffness”], but about the myriad interchanges occurring constantly between our inner and outer realities, or Frameworks 1 and 2, as he calls them. Some of that framework material is personal, but much more of it is general.

In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological gestalt—and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word “being,” since it is the source from which all being emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension (long pause), a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized (long pause, eyes closed) by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multiloving constant focus.

(9:34.) The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term “conscious mind” as you define it, for you allow it to accept as evidence only those physical data available for the five senses—while the five senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat² view of reality, that deals with the most apparent surface.

The physical senses are the extensions of inner senses ³ that are, in one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of communication. The c-e-l-l-s (spelled out), then, possess inner senses.

In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.

(Long pause.) Your consciousness will survive your body’s death, but it will also take on another kind of form—a form that is itself composed of “units of consciousness.” You have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. The divine gestalt, however, is expressed in such a way that its quality (pause) is undiluted. It cannot be watered down, so that in basic terms one portion of existence is somehow up or down the scale from another. It is all Grade A (with amusement).

(Long pause at 9:55.) In the beginning, then, there was a subjective world that became objective. Matter was not yet permanent, in your terms, for consciousness was not yet as stable there. In the beginning, then, there was a dream world, in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality, and gradually became awake within that world.

Mountains rose and tumbled. Oceans filled. Tidal waves thundered. Islands appeared. The seasons themselves were not stable. In your terms the magnetic fields themselves fluctuated—but all of the species were there at the beginning, though in the same fashion, for as the dream world broke through into physical reality there was all of the tumultuous excitement and confusion with which a mass creative event is achieved. There was much greater plasticity, motion, variety, give-and-take, as consciousness experimented with its own forms. The species and environment together formed themselves in concert, in glorious combination, so that each fulfilled the requirements of its own existence while adding to the fulfillment of all other portions of physical reality (all very intently, and with many gestures).

I have a purpose in this book—for this is dictation—and that purpose is to change your ideas of yourselves, by showing you a truer picture of your history both in terms of your immortal consciousness and your physical heritage.

2. I see correlations between the “flat view of reality” given to us by our physical senses, as Seth maintains, and the “flat” view of the universe that cosmologists perceive when they look way out into space. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that space can curve, and this has been shown to happen near our sun. Yet when scientists examine our universe of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, they see space as essentially flat, instead of curving in upon itself as it should over those enormous distances. Nor can the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe account for the homogeneity of a flat universe. The inflationary model can explain both the appearance of flatness and homogeneity—but, like all theories, it poses other problems that have yet to be resolved.