“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we waited for tonight’s session to begin I read to Jane a letter I’ve just written to a prominent biologist. I’m asking his help in obtaining source material for the visual “evidence” for evolution — showing the forms involved, say, as little by little the descendants of the reptile changed into the bird. By evidence in this case I mean drawings, based upon the best scientific assumptions as to what all of those intermediate creatures must have looked like. I also wanted estimates as to how they survived for so many millennia while the changes took place. As far as I’ve been able to learn, no such transitional fossils have been found, like the discrete forms of reptiles and birds that have been discovered, so I decided to search out the next best thing: the visual representations as to what they must have looked like. But what good were the developing stages of a wing, I wondered, and how many uncounted generations of reptiles-turning-into-birds had to carry those appendages, before a fully-formed bird was finally hatched that could fly? Would nature do things that way?

(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.

Many of you keep searching for some seemingly remote spiritual inner self that you can trust and look to for help and support, but all the while you distrust the familiar self with which you have such intimate contact. You set up divisions between portions of the self that are unnecessary.

Some correspondents write: “I realize that I am too egotistical.” There are many schools for spiritual advancement that teach you to “get rid of the clutter of your impulses and desires,” to shove aside the self that you are in search of a greater idealized version. First of all, the self that you are is ever-changing and never static. There is an inner self in the terms of those definitions, but that inner self, which is the source of your present being, speaks through your impulses. They provide in-built spiritual and biological impetuses toward your most ideal development (underlined). You must trust the self that you are, now.

Again, impulses are inherently good, both spiritually and biologically. They emerge from Framework 2, from the inner self, and they are based on the great inner webwork of communication that exists among all species on your planet. (Pause.) Impulses also provide the natural impetus toward those patterns of behavior that serve you best, so that while certain impulses may bunch up toward physical activity, say, others, seemingly contradictory, will lead toward quiet contemplation, so that overall certain balances are maintained.

(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.

Consciousness predates physical forms. Consciousness predates the physical universe. (Long pause.) Consciousness predates all of its manifestations.

The patterns for the earth and for its creatures were as real before their physical appearances, and far more real than, say, the plan for a painting that you might have in your mind. The universe always was innately (underlined) objective in your terms, with its planets and creatures. The patterns for all of the species always existed without any before or after arrangement.

(Pause.) I am not pleased with those analogies, but sometimes they are all I can use to express issues so outside of normal channels of knowledge. It is as if, then, the earth, with all of its species, existed in complete form as a fully dimensioned cosmic underpainting, which gradually came alive all at once. Birds did not come from reptiles. They were always birds. They expressed a certain kind of consciousness that sought a certain kind of form (all intently). Physically the species appeared — all species appeared — in the same way that you might imagine all of the elements of a highly complicated dream suddenly coming alive with physical properties. Mental images — in those terms, now — existed that “in a flash of cosmic inspiration” were suddenly endowed with full physical manifestation.

To that extent, the Bible’s interpretation is correct. Life was given, was free to develop according to its characteristic conditions. The planet was prepared, and endowed with life. Consciousness built the forms, so life existed within consciousness for all eternity. There was no point in which chemicals or atoms suddenly acquired life, for they always possessed consciousness, which is life’s requirement.

In the terms that you can understand (underlined), all species that you are aware of (underlined) appeared more or less at once, because the mental patterns had peaked (gesturing). Their vitality was strong enough to form differentiation and cooperation within the framework of matter.

(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.

But what gives life to the egg or the seed now, keeps it going, provides that energy? Imagining some great big-bang theory (to explain the creation of the universe) gives you an immense explosion of energy, that somehow turns into life but must wear out somewhere along the line — and if that were the case, life would be getting weaker all the time, but it is not. The child is as new and fresh today as a child was 5,000 years ago, and each spring is as new.

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.

(“I guess the feeling I was getting was that some part of consciousness dreamed of the earth, and visited it all the time; and then some part woke up in it and became it for a while, with whatever it needed already there….”