“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

This human self-consciousness existed in psychological time and in inner time long before you as a species constructed it in terms of your particular camouflage patterns. For your friend’s sake I will simplify this, saying that human consciousness was inherent and latent from the beginning of your physical universe.

I am not saying that you should not believe the evidence of your senses; I am waiting for you to say that. We know that our so-called tables are not solid. Even your science knows this now, and yet your eyes see the table as solid. Face up to it, my dear lovelies: Your senses lie. The table is a conglomeration of quickly-moving atoms and molecules but you see it as a table, and you see it as solid. Your senses, and again this is to bring John-Philip up to date, your senses are perceptors of a camouflage physical world which is created by the inner self through the use of mental enzymes in a pattern set by the mental genes.

Because I say that you create your physical universe in the same manner and as automatically and as unself-consciously as you create with your breath a pattern of steam upon a glass pane, this does not mean that you create all that is. It merely means that you create your own physical environment. And if I have your permission, Joseph, we will meet tomorrow evening to go into other matters.

(In this session Seth spoke of my past life and attributed my current patterns of life to the lessons learned by my previous existences. Of immediately provable fact is that during the session Jane [Ruburt] spoke with a deeper voice than usual, she had a definite Boston accent on certain words. Prior to the start of the session I had, in conversation, asked Robbie [Joseph] a question involving his point of continuous existence versus evolution. Seth answered my questions and while he was giving his general answer, other related questions would creep into my mind and these would immediately be answered by Seth. This happened so frequently that towards the end of the session, when I would think of a question I would have immediate confidence that it would be subsequently answered.