“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Science likes to think that it deals with predictable action. It perceives such a small amount of data, however, and in such a limited area, that the great inner unpredictability of any molecule, atom, or wave is not apparent. Scientists perceive only what appears within your system, and that often appears predictable.

Statistics provide an artificial, predetermined framework in which your reality is then examined. Mathematics is a theoretical organized structure that of itself imposes your ideas of order and predictability. Statistically, the position of an atom can be theorized, but no one knows where any given atom is at any given time.⁴

The cells are also aware of probabilities in a more familiar fashion than you are, as they manipulate the past and future history of the body. Ruburt now, again, is experiencing massiveness, as in your idea of probabilities the cellular structure feels its vast endurance. Working with events not even real to you, it produces a physical structure that maintains identity and predictability out of a vastly creative network. That network is unpredictable, yet from it Ruburt can predictably put ashes into that shell. (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.

Now: Your beliefs and intents cause you to pick, from an unpredictable group of actions, those that you want to happen. You experience those events. (To me:) “Your” desire to live straddled the death of the child in an operation. The child’s desire to die chose that event. People are as free as atoms are. Give us a moment … In no way could you predict what would happen to the child in that photograph of yourself.⁶ In no way now can you “predict” what will happen to you now. You can choose to accept as your reality any number of given unpredictable events. In that respect, the choice is yours, but all the events you do not accept occur nevertheless.

(Long pause at 11:05.) Part of Ruburt’s feeling of massiveness comes from the mass experience of the body, existing all at once. Therefore to him the body feels larger. Calculations impossible to describe occur, so that from this basic unpredictability you experience what seem to be predictable actions. This is only because you focus upon those actions that “make sense” in your reality, and ignore all others. I am not speaking symbolically, of course, when I say you died as a youngster. Nor was any harsh reality forced upon the mother by the dying child, for that portion of your mother was the part that regretted having had the child.

Anything less than complete unpredictability will ultimately result in stagnation, or orders of existence that in the long run are self-defeating. Only from unpredictability can any system emerge that can be predictable within itself. Only within complete freedom of motion is any “ordered” motion truly possible.

From the “chaotic” bed of your dreams springs your ordered daily organized action. In your reality, the behavior of your consciousness and of your molecules are highly connected. Your type of consciousness presupposes a molecular consciousness, and your kind of consciousness is inherent in molecular consciousness — inherent within your system, but not basically predictable. Predictability is simply another word for significance. Unpredictability, looking at itself in a variety of different fashions, finds certain portions of itself significant, and forms certain orders, or ordered sequences, about itself. In one of our very early sessions, I told you that you perceive from a vast field only certain data that you find meaningful. That data could only arise from the bed of unpredictability. Only unpredictability can provide the greatest source of probable orders.

Since Seth mentioned predictions in connection with the photograph, this is a good time to present a few of the things he said in an earlier session about his own ability to predict, and about the subject in general. Jane and I have found this very useful material to keep in mind. From the 234th session for February 16, 1966:

“Now: Often precognitive information will appear to be wrong. In some cases this is because a self has chosen a different probable event for physical materialization [than the one predicted]. I have access to the field of probabilities and you do not, egotistically…. To me, your past, present, and future merge into one.

“These choices, however, are based upon your changing perception of past and present. Because I have a larger scope of perception than you, I can with greater facility predict what may happen. But this is dependent upon my prediction as to which choice [of probable events] you will make, and the choice is still your own … Predictions, per se, do not contradict the theory of free will, though free will is dependent upon much more than any freedom of the ego alone. If the ego were allowed to make all the choices, with no veto power from other layers of the self, you would all be in a sad position indeed.