“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The ability of the entity to transform energy into an idea and then to construct it physically determines the entity’s place on the physical evolutionary plane. Simple organisms are capable of “picking up” fewer communications. Their range is less, but the vitality and validity of their constructions is excellent. In simple organisms such as the paramecium and amoeba, the few sharp ideas received are constructed almost simultaneously, without reflection. The organism needs no other mechanism to translate ideas. What it has is sufficient.

The reflection is brief, but for a moment the animal partakes of a new dimension. The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. There is a pause: the organism — dog or tiger — can choose to attack or not to attack. The amoeba must construct its small world without reflection and without time as we know it.

Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man, the opposite becomes true. He has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him to construct all of his ideas physically. As his scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.