“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This is in itself an expression of the dualism of which I have spoken. Evolution does not of course apply only to the human species, and as I have said consciousness on your plane exists in all things. When your friend asked his question he was, I believe, referring to the point at which self-consciousness entered into so-called inert form.

You know now that so-called inert form has consciousness. To some degree it even possesses self-consciousness, and so there is no point at which self-consciousness entered, so to speak, with the sound of trumpets. Consciousness, to a degree, was inherent in the first materialization physically upon your plane.

The beginnings of human consciousness, on the other hand, began as soon as multicellular groupings began to form in field patterns of a certain complexity. While there was no specific point of entry as far as human consciousness was concerned, there was a point before which human consciousness as such did not exist. Self-consciousness did exist. The consciousness of being human in your terms was fully developed in the caveman, but—and I cannot emphasize this enough—the human conception was alive in the fish.

All this involved an idea of, and I hesitate to say advancement, but an idea of change along certain lines. We have spoken of mental genes. These are more or less psychic blueprints for physical matter, and in these mental genes existed the pattern for your human type of self-consciousness. It did not appear constructed, that is in constructed form, for a long period of physical time however, and we have discussed psychological time as being part of what I will call for now an inner time sense.