1 result for (book:ur1 AND heading:"introductori note by robert f butt" AND stemmed:aliv)
[... 39 paragraphs ...]
In his laboratories, man thus has great opportunities to obtain preprogrammed answers, based on what he thinks he already knows; his exteriorized equipment can hardly produce anything else. (A scientist doesn’t call an atom of oxygen, or one of any other element, alive, let alone conscious. Yet a collection of certain atoms assembled into a human form calls itself alive — and vehemently denies the same status to identical atoms that have the misfortune to exist outside of that human framework.) But some of the reasons for our exceedingly poor understanding of the general human state are discussed by Seth in the material he’s given over the last decade, and I’m sure there is much more to come.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
“We love to look ‘backward’ at our animal origins. We take it for granted that evolution in those terms is over, and here we are — aha, kings of the mountain. But maybe we’re just in the middle, sensing imperfectly the existence of other remote versions of ourselves that will appear in a ‘future’ too far ahead of us to know. Maybe I’m some distant ancestor of Seth’s in those terms, alive in my life but only a memory in his. But he insists there’s fresh action in the past; so if that’s the case, I’m still searching out my own paths.
“When I get this far in my own thinking, a peculiar acceleration seizes me. My body grows very relaxed, but my mind has a strange feeling of motion as if something I’m trying to comprehend is going past me too fast to follow; yet I keep trying to twirl faster myself to catch up. If one of my cells tried to comprehend my own subjective reality, it might feel the same way. I think that I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body. Only I keep groping … and sensing events that my own reality can’t really understand.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]