“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Your next question is easy to anticipate, of course, for you will want to know the origin of that “interior” universe from which I have said the exterior one ever emerges — and here we must part company with treasured objectivity, and enter instead a mental domain, in which it is seen that contradictions are not errors; an inner domain large enough to contain contradictions at one level, for at another level they are seen to be no contradictions at all.

Thusly, your classifications of various species appear to you as the only logical kinds of divisions that could be made among living things. Quite the contrary is the case, however. That particular overall method of separation leads to such questions as: “Which species came first, and which came later, and how did the various species emerge — one from the other?” Those questions are further brought about by your time classifications, without which they would be meaningless.

Your present methods will simply bring you pat, manufactured results and answers. They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul. Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence, you must look where you have not before — into the reality of your own minds and emotions. You must look to the natural universe that you know. You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers. Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

The subjective feeling of your being, your intimate experience from moment-to moment — these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to you the universe possesses. You are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework your feelings and thoughts have a reality to you personally that transcends all such classifications. You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somehow eternal.