“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I have said, for example, that the universe expands as an idea does, and so the visible universe sprang into being in the same manner. The whole affair is quite complicated since — again as I have intimated — the world freshly springs into new creativity at each moment. No matter what your version of creativity, or the creation of the world, you are stuck with questions of where such energy came from, for it seems that unimaginable energy was released more or less at one time, and that this energy must then run out.

If the universe were a painting, for example, the painter would not have first painted darkness, then an explosion, then a cell, then the joining together of groups of cells into a simple organism, then that organism’s multiplication into others like it, or traced a pattern from an amoeba or a paramecium on upward — but he or she would have instead begun with a panel of light, an underpainting, in which all of the world’s organisms were included, though not in detail. Then in a creativity that came from the painting itself the colors would grow rich, the species attain their delineations, the winds blow and the seas move with the tides.

The motion and energy of the universe still come from within. I certainly realize that this is hardly a scientific statement — yet the moment that All That Is conceived of a physical universe it was invisibly created, endowed with creativity, and bound to emerge.

Almost anyone will agree, I should hope, that the universe is a most splendid example of creativity. Few would agree, however, that you can learn more about the nature of the universe by examining your own creativity than you can by examining the world through instruments — and here is exquisite irony, for you create the instruments of creativity, even while at the same time you often spout theories that deny to man all but the most mechanical of reactions.

These are creative distortions on your part, directly related to specializations of consciousness that cut you off from the greater concourse existing at other levels between the species and the land. Again, consciousness everywhere pervades the universe, and is aware of all conditions. The balance of nature upon your planet is no chance occurrence, but the result of constant, instant computations on the part of each most minute consciousness, whether it forms part of a rock, a person, an animal, a plant. Each invisibly “holds space together,” whatever its station. This is a cooperative venture. Your own consciousness has its particular unique qualities, in that like other comparatively long-lived species, you associate your identity with your form far more rigidly. Other kinds of consciousness “leap in and out of forms” with greatest leeway. There is a biological understanding that exists, for example, when one animal kills another one for food. The consciousness of the prey leaves its body under the impetus of a kind of stimulus unknown to you.

(To me:) Since your birth a probability has occurred that you could have followed, in which your wars did not happen. There is another probability in which the Second World War ended in nuclear destruction, and you did not enter that one either. You chose “this” probable reality in order to ask certain questions about the nature of man — seeing him where he wavered equally between creativity and destruction, knowledge and ignorance; but a point that contained potentials for the most auspicious kinds of development, in your eyes. The same applies to Ruburt.

You each also became involved in this probability precisely to use it as a creative stimulus that would make you seek for a certain kind of understanding. There is always a creative give-and-take between the individual and his world. To some extent or another each of those involved in this probability chose it for their own reasons. Saying this, however, I also say that many leave this probability for another when they have learned and contributed.