“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He spent his last years proving it, and yet it has no validity. It has a validity within very limited perspectives only, for consciousness does, indeed, evolve form and form does not evolve consciousness. All consciousness does, indeed, exist at once and, therefore, it did not evolve in those terms. It is according to when you come into the picture, and what you choose to observe, and what part of the play you decide to observe. It is more the other way around in that evolved consciousness forms itself into many different patterns and reigns down in reality. Consciousness did not come from atoms and molecules scattered by chance through the universe or scattered by chance through many universes. Consciousness did not arrive because inert matter suddenly sparked into activity and song. The consciousness existed first and evolved the form into which it then began to manifest itself.

Now if you had all been really paying attention to what I have said for some time about the simultaneous nature of time and existence, then you would have known that the theory of evolution is as beautiful as a tale as the theory of Biblical creation. Both are quite handy and both are methods of telling stories and both might seem to agree within their own systems, and yet, in larger respects they cannot be realities. I am addressing this to our friend over here (Arnold) and partially to our friend over here because you should understand what I am speaking of. But, then, no one asked me about the nature of evolution before until recently when our friend, Joseph, read a book. No—no form of matter, however potent, will be self-evolved into consciousness no matter what other bits of matter are added to it, but without the consciousness, the matter would not be there in the universe floating around waiting for another component to give it reality, consciousness, existence or song.

Now think physically again of our onion, but imagine instead, psychic realities forming its skin, each interconnected with the other. Or imagine an orange, each atom of it connected with each other and yet each one individual and each representing a reality. It may seem that there would be no way to get out of the reality of the orange if you were forced upon its surface, but to go round and round, and you might seem isolated. And so, in your reality, you might seem isolated, and yet that orange is in another basket of oranges, and the skin of it touches another. And so your subjective lives touch lives that you do not know, and yet each of these are unique. In all of these realities, there are no exact duplicates.

(To Florence.) Now last week when Ruburt was speaking about the natives who are such expert dreamers, you asked, our Lady of Florence, then why are they not more progressive? And yet I know that you realize that your own progress as a civilization, in your terms, will come to a halt unless you progress in other directions. This is what your civilization is learning. That you cannot rape your planet. And life did not begin as some isolated single organism that in the great probabilities of existence meant another, and then another, and then another, until a chain of molecules could be made and selves formed. Neither does consciousness exist, using an analogy, as simple organisms separated by vast distances, but as a complicated gestalt.