“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 Preface I also wrote about how I thought the great blossomings of religious consciousness and scientific consciousness engendered by the events at Three Mile Island and Jonestown/Iran would continue to grow, once born, seemingly with lives of their own. Jane and I have watched these effects steadily increase since we held the 885th session. Now, our country’s initial concern over the accident at TMI has grown to include deep questions about why we’ve built so many nuclear energy generating plants near large population centers; carrying out a mass evacuation in case of a serious accident at any of those sites seems to present a series of insurmountable challenges.

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.

The [universe] is, as I explained, always coming into existence, and each present moment brings its own built-in past along with it. You agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available data that compose any moment individually or globally. You accept only those data that fit in with your ideas of motion in time. As a result, for example, your archeological evidence usually presents a picture quite in keeping with your ideas of history, geological eras, and so forth.

(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.

Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your] world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases—nor was the world, again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you (with some humor), and better models coming every geological season.

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).

You limit the capacity of your conscious mind by refusing to allow it to use a larger scope of attention, so that you have remained closed and ignorant about the different, varied, but rich experiences of other species: They do appear beneath you. You have allowed a certain stubborn literal-mindedness to provide you with definitions that served to categorize rather than illuminate other realities beside your own.

(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).

(Pause.) Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil, as I will explain later in this book. God, or All That Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the contradiction that seems to be presented to your minds. In a sense, however (underlined), a creative product, say, helps complete an artist, while of course the artist can never be completed. All That is, or God, in a certain fashion, now (underlined)—and this is qualified—learns as you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. We must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too easily, but in a basic sense you all carry within yourselves the undeniable mark of All That Is—and an inbuilt capacity—capacity—to glimpse in your own terms undeniable evidence of your own greater existence. You are as close to the beginning of [your] world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the moment.

A. God the Father. There’s no way to assign any reasonably accurate date to when God the Father created all things, as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. (The Biblical account of Creation makes evolution an impossibility.) Nor can the date of Creation be arrived at by counting the Bible’s lists of generations, as given in the Old Testament, since these may well be incomplete.

D. Zeus was the supreme god of the ancient Greeks, who worshipped him in connection with almost every facet of daily life. He was the son of Cronus and Rhea, and the husband of his sister Hera. The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme god, Jupiter, or Jove.

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.