“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause, one of many.) Light can be defined as a wave or as a particle,² and the same is true in many other instances. Consciousness, for example, can be defined as a wave or as a particle, for it can operate as either, and appear as either, even though its true definition would have to include the creative capacity to shape itself into such forms.

You cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe—for (suddenly louder) that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be contained in any of your specifications. While everything seems neat and tidy within those specifications, and whole, you operate with brilliant nonchalance in the theater of time and space. Time and space are each the result of psychological properties. (Pause.) When you ask how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then you are taking it for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute qualities. You are asking for answers that can only be found by going outside of the context of usual experience—for within that experience you are always led back to beginnings and endings, consecutive moments, and a world that seems to have within it no evidences of any other source.

(Pause at 9:23.) The physical world as you know it is unique, vital to the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part of that universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. That reality is dependent upon the perceptions of each kind of life that composes it. It is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression from that divine gestalt of being—and that divine gestalt of being is of such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear within any one of its own realities, its own worlds.

(Long pause.) When you are dreaming you cannot pinpoint your dream location in the same way that you can determine, say, the chair or the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which you dream. That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take place within it. Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it is a mass psychologically shared property—but at one “time” in the beginning this was not so.

(Pause.) What was such a world like, and how can you possibly relate it to the world that you know?

(Pause.) Give us a moment…. You have taught yourselves to respond to certain neural patterns, and to ignore alternate ones that now simply operate as background activity. That background activity, however, supports a million forces: the neural stimuli that you accept as biologically real. Those other background stimuli are now quite difficult for you to identify, but they are always there in the [hinterland] of your waking consciousness, like dream chatter way beneath your usual associations.

Electrons in your terms are precognitive, and so is your cellular consciousness. Your body’s relative permanence in time is dependent upon the electron’s magnificent behavior as it deals with probabilities. (Pause.) The cell’s stability, and its reliability in the bodily environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication with all others and is united with all others through fields of consciousness,³ in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.

(9:51.) Give us a moment…. “In the beginning” you were only aware of that psychological activity. It had not “as yet” thickened itself into form. The form was there, but it was not manifest (intently). I do not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small particles (long pause), you had small units of consciousness gradually building themselves into large ones—but a smaller unit of consciousness, you see, is not “less than” a larger unit, for each unit of consciousness contains within itself the innate (underlined) heritage of All That Is.

(10:01. Now Seth gave a few paragraphs for Jane, then said good night at 10:10 P.M. Even with the many pauses she’d used this evening—most of which I didn’t indicate—Jane’s delivery had often been quite intent and meaningful. In their own way the pauses served as additional punctuation and emphasis for some of Seth’s information.)