“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions — a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter. There is no point at which consciousness emerged. Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them. The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that you do not perceive, sometimes because your time sequences are too different. Before the smallest cell appeared, in your terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.

In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination — that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible — and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

There was no point at which consciousness was introduced, because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged. That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence. In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.