“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.

Give us a moment … True order and organization, even of biological structure, can be achieved only by granting a basic unpredictability. I am aware that this sounds startling. Basically, however, the motion of any wave or particle or entity is unpredictable — freewheeling and undetermined. Your life structure is a result of that unpredictability. Your psychological structure is also. However, because you are presented with a fairly cohesive picture, in which certain laws seem to apply, you think that the laws come first and physical reality follows. Instead, the cohesive picture is the result of the unpredictable nature that is and must be basic to all energy.

4. I thought that in his last sentence especially Seth was flirting with the principle of uncertainty, or indeterminacy, as postulated in 1927 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. In quantum mechanics this axiom maintains that it’s not possible to simultaneously ascertain the momentum and position of a subatomic wave-particle like an electron, say — electrons being one of the qualities that make up atoms. The day after this session was held, I asked Jane if she’d heard of Heisenberg. She hadn’t; nor did she understand his work, as best I could explain it to her.

To simplify a great deal: In modern physics it’s said that atoms are processes, not things; that atoms and/or their constituents can appear as either waves or particles, depending on how we observe them; and that these qualities exist outside of our coarse world of space and time. Atoms are patterns of probabilities. It’s further said that our attempts to describe or visualize such nonphysical qualities inevitably cause us to misinterpret them; so the artist wonders whether the atom’s movement in more than one direction at once may not be perfectly “natural” in its own environment — some sort of ability quite separate from any play we may indulge in with words while trying to consciously comprehend it.