“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’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….”

(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.

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.

Some people are only aware of — or largely aware of — impulses toward anger, because they have inhibited those natural impulses toward love that would otherwise temper what seemed to be aggressive desires. When you begin trusting yourselves, you start by taking it for granted that to some extent at least you have not trusted yourself or your impulses in the past: You have thought that impulses were dangerous, disruptive, or even evil. So as you begin to learn self-trust, you acknowledge your impulses. You try them on for size. You see where they lead you by allowing them some freedom. You do not follow urges through that would hurt others physically, or that seem in direct contradiction to your present beliefs — but you do acknowledge them. You do try to discover their source. Behind them you will almost always find an inhibited impulse — or many of them — that motivated you to move in some ideal direction, to seek a love or understanding so idealized in your mind that it seemed impossible to achieve. You are left with the impulse to strike out.

(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.

(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.

(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.

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.

(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.

(But no matter, for it certainly seemed that with his material on evolution this evening Seth was preparing for his next book: Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. See the closing notes for Session 869.)