“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I’m a professional artist,” I wrote to the scientist, “and at times have been puzzled enough by questions about evolution to consider making my own series of drawings that would show the transformation from reptile to bird, for instance, just to see if I could do it convincingly…. But each time I start visualizing the results, I end up with two notions: First, that as I work with those intermediate forms I’ll become involved with myth and fantasy, rather than ‘fact.’ Just how did reptiles change into birds? What kind of intermediate forms were there? Second, the idea of my drawings makes me think that others must have done it already, not once but many times. So what I really want to ask you for are references to later textbooks, that are more clear and precise than those I have on the origin of major new species. I’m especially interested in visual data….”

(I wrote about evolution in Appendix 12 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Following all the studying I had to do in order to produce that piece, I’ve become very cautious in considering the theory — after all, even the dictionaries still refer to it as the theory [my emphasis] of evolution! “It seems to me,” I said to Jane, “that if science wants to be believed, it should offer some data that are at least reasonably convincing. If science wants to talk about the tree of life, of reptiles turning into birds, then we’ve certainly got the right to see all — or at least most — of the leaves on the tree, not just those at the tips of the branches.” Meaning, of course, that many of those invisible leaves would represent the missing, physical, intermediate forms demanded by evolutionary theory.

(The scientist in question may never answer my letter, but it’s already had one unexpected beneficial effect: Tonight, after he finished book dictation, Seth gave an excellent summation of his own version of what our species like to call evolution. I intend to copy it for use whenever the need arises, as well as to simply remind myself periodically of its contents.

If you would know yourself in deepest terms, you must start with your own feelings, emotions, desires, intents and impulses. Spiritual knowledge and psychic wisdom are the natural result of a sense of self-unity.

If you examine such troublesome stimuli, you will always find that they originally rose after a long process, a process in which you were afraid to take small positive steps toward some ideal. Your own impulses naturally lead you to seek creative fulfillment, the expansion of your consciousness, psychic excursions, and the conscious knowledge and manipulation of your dreams.

(All intently at 9:40:) No methods will work if you are afraid of your own impulses, or of the nature of your own being. Most of you understand that All That Is is within you, that God is within creation, within physical matter, and that “He” does not simply operate as some cosmic director on the outside of reality. You must understand that the spiritual self also exists within the physical self in the same fashion. The inner self is not remote, either — not divorced from your most intimate desires and affairs, but instead communicates through your own smallest gesture, through your smallest ideal.

This sense of division within the self forces you to think that there is a remote, spiritual, wise, intuitive inner self, and a bewildered, put-upon, spiritually ignorant, inferior physical self, which happens to be the one you identify with. Many of you believe, moreover, that the physical self’s very nature is evil, that its impulses, left alone, will run in direct opposition to the good of the physical world and society, and fly in the face of the deeper spiritual truths of inner reality. The inner self then becomes so idealized and so remote that by contrast the physical self seems only the more ignorant and flawed. In the face of such beliefs the ideal of psychic development, or astral travel, or spiritual knowledge, or even of sane living, seems so remote as to be impossible. You must, therefore, begin to celebrate your own beings, to look to your own impulses as being the natural connectors between the physical and the nonphysical self. Children trusting their impulses learn to walk, and trusting your impulses, you can find yourselves again.

(Pause at 10:07.) I understand that it appears that species have vanished, but again you must remember probabilities, and that those species simply “developed” along the patterns of probable earths. You are not just dealing with a one-line development of matter, but of an unimaginable creativity, in which all versions of your physical world exist, each one quite convinced of its physical nature. There are ramifications quite unspeakable, although in certain states of trance, or with the aid of educated dreaming, you might be able to glimpse the inner complications, the webworks of communications that connect your official earth with other probable ones. You choose your time and focus in physical reality again and again, and the mind holds an inner comprehension of many seemingly mysterious developments involving the species.

Even the c-e-l-l-s (spelled) are free enough of time and space to hold an intimate framework of being within the present, while being surrounded by this greater knowledge of what you think of as the earth’s past. In greater terms, the earth and all of its species are created in each moment. You wonder what gave life to the first egg or seed, or whatever, and think that an answer to that question would answer most others; for life, you say, was simply passed on from that point.

What gives life to chemicals now? That is the more proper question. All energy is (underlined) not only aware-ized but the source of all organizations of consciousness, and all physical forms. These represent frameworks of consciousness. (Long pause.) There was a day when the dreaming world, in your terms, suddenly awakened to full reality as far as physical materialization is concerned. The planet was visited by desire. There were ghost excursions there — mental buildings, dream civilizations which then became actualized.

(10:23 P.M. “I don’t know where the hell I was tonight,” Jane said. “I might as well have been without a body, I was so far out. The only thing I could feel was that he was trying to find analogies to make clear that section about evolution. Actually, what I got was — my feeling is — that we don’t have the concepts yet for something that seems so alien to our ordinary reality. No matter how hard we try, even you and me. But I don’t mean that personally or anything.