“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 for Dreams I mentioned Jane’s idea for a second book of poetry. She’s progressed with the subject matter for it to the point where Seth could remark on November 21: “The book of love poetry is an excellent idea.” For now Jane wants the volume to contain some of the poetry she’s dedicated to me over the years since we met in February 1954. She called Tam Mossman last month about the book, and they discussed possible titles for it. But Jane doesn’t yet have one she likes.

As for Iran, I described how last February [1979] a mob of Marxist-led Iranian guerrillas overran the United States Embassy in that country’s capital, Tehran, and temporarily held prisoner some 70 Americans. I noted that such a situation could happen again—and it did: On November 4, Iranian students assaulted our embassy compound and took 63 Americans hostage; 3 others were imprisoned at Iran’s Foreign Ministry. Day 1 began of a countdown toward the release of the hostages (it’s day 30 as I write this note). The Moslem militants released 13 of our citizens—5 white women and 8 black men—who returned home by Thanksgiving Day, but this time they kept in bondage the remaining 53 Americans. Iran holds our entire country in contempt.

This may hardly be original thinking here, but these proliferations of consciousness imply some pretty fantastic abilities on the part of we humans—for such developments show that even though we live as small creatures within the incredible richness of an overall consciousness, or All That Is, still our actions can result in that great consciousness exploring new areas of itself. Quite awesome creative abilities on our part, I’d say, and ones that unknowingly we take for granted. We do this all of the time, of course, individually and collectively.

(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.

(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.

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).

That kind of an event simply cannot fit into your concepts of “the beginning of the world,” with consciousness arising out of matter almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a divine but mechanistic natural world.

(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.

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.