“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….”

(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.

(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.

(“Do you realize the transformations in belief that would have to take place before this material was even considered by the elite — let alone accepted?” I asked. “It would destroy the world of a scientist who believed in evolution. That is, if he would pay any attention to it to begin with.”

(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.)