“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In thinking in terms of consecutive time, however, evolution does not march from the past into the future. Instead, the species is precognitively aware of those changes it wants to make, and from the “future” it alters the “present” state of the chromosomes and genes² to bring about in the probable future the specific changes it desires. Both above and below your usual conscious focus, then, time is experienced in an entirely different fashion, and is constantly manipulated,³ as physically you manipulate matter.

The CU’s, forming the structure later in its entirety, form all the atoms, molecules, cells, and organs that make up your world. Land changes and alterations of species are conditions brought about in line with overall patterns that involve all species, or land and water masses, at any given “time.” There is a great organization of consciousness involved on such occasions — sometimes creative cataclysms, in which, again from its own precognitive information, nature brings about those situations best suited to its needs. Such biological precognition is firmly based in the chromosomes and genes, and reflected in the cells. As mentioned earlier (in the 684tb session), the present corporal structure of any physical body of any kind is maintained only because of the cells’ innate precognitive abilities. To the self the future, of course, is not experienced as future. It is simply one of the emerging conditions of an experienced Now (you had better capitalize that). The cells’ practically felt “Now” includes, then, what you would think of as past and future, as simple conditions of Nowness. They maintain the body’s structure in your poised time only by manipulating themselves in a rich medium of probabilities. There is a constant give-and-take of communication between the cell as you know it in present time, and the cell as it “was” in the past, or “will be.”

The cell’s comprehension leaps its present form. The reality, the physical reality of a given cell, is the focused result of its existence before and after itself in time; and from its knowledge of past and future it receives its present structure.

(Long pause.) In a larger sense the same applies to any given species. You are your selves in time, then, because of the selves that exist before and after you in time. On a cellular basis this is true. In psychic terms it is also true. Your thoughts and feelings are quite as real as your cells. They also form organizations. Your desires go out from you in time, but in all directions. On the one hand as a species your present forms your future, but in even deeper terms your precognitive awareness of your own possibilities from the future helps to form the present that will then make that probable future your reality.

In physical terms you may want a new city, so now you begin urban renewal, colon: Architects draw plans that first were dreams, of course; inside their minds, preparations are begun, buildings torn down. In very simple terms the architect’s dream can be called a precognitive event, inserted from a probable future into the present. The physical planning carried out is in line with the envisioned future, and brings it about. In greater terms the race has plans for itself; only these are based on a much vaster comprehension of the probable issues, abilities, and conditions involved. (Pause.) A people’s recognized god represents such a psychic plan, projected out as an ideal. It will be followed by physical organizations, structures meant on a different level to help achieve such a “spiritual” evolution.

Because you dwell in time, however, the god image will also reflect the state of your consciousness as it “is,” as well as point toward the future state desired. The god concept will operate as a psychic and spiritual blueprint just like the architect’s plan, only at a different level. Each species has within it such blueprints to varying degrees, and these are important, for they carry within them the idealized probabilities. They are valid, again, psychically and biologically. They will serve as biological patterns to the cells, as well as psychic stimuli in terms of consciousness.

Christ, as he is known historically, psychically represented man’s probabilities. His theories and teachings could be interpreted in many ways; they stood for kernels that man could sow as he wished. Because of Christ, there was an England — and an Industrial Revolution. The male aspects of Christ were the ones that Western civilization emphasized. Other portions of his teachings did not follow the main line of Christian thought, and were buried.

Rising ego consciousness then would have its religious reasons for domination and control. The pope became God the Father personified, but that god had indeed changed from the old Jewish Jehovah. Christ, historically speaking, had altered that concept enough so that at least God the Father was not quite as capricious as Jehovah. (Pause.) Some mercy came to the forefront. Growing ego consciousness could not run rampant over nature. On the other hand, holy wars and ignorance would keep the population down. The church, however — the Roman Catholic Church — still held a repository of religious ideas and concepts that served as a bank of probabilities from which the race could draw. The religious ideas served as social organization, much needed, and many of the monks managed to preserve old manuscripts and knowledge underground. Those who were allied with religious principles, now, mainly survived, and brought forth communities and descendants who were protected. Psychic and religious ideas, then, despite many drawbacks, served as a method of species organization. They are far more important in terms of “evolution” than is recognized. Religious concepts from the beginning kept tribes together, provided social structures, and insured physical survival and the protection that made descendants most probable.

Jane added that she might have read speculative matter involving Christ, the occult, and the Essenes; and probably, we thought many “secret teachings” have been attributed to Christ.

(Long pause.) Other democratic societies had existed in the past, but in them democracy was still based on one religious precept, though it might be expressed in different ways — as, for example, in the Greek city-states (in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.). The Holy Roman Empire united a civilization under one religious idea, but the true brotherhood of man can be expressed only by allowing the freedom of man’s thought under the banner of cooperation; and only this will result in the fulfillment of the species, with developments of consciousness that in your terms were latent from the beginning.

Many of the species that share your world bear within themselves latent abilities that are even now developing. Men and animals will again meet upon the earth, with the old understanding in yet a new situation.⁷ There are no closed systems, and in deep biological orders each species knows what another is doing, and its place in the overall scheme that has been chosen by each. You are perceived in one way or another by all those inhabitants of earth you may consider beneath you. Probable man is emerging now, but also in relationship with his entire natural environment, in which cooperation is a main force. You are cooperating with nature whether or not you realize it, for you are a part of it.

Jane dealt with some of her own concepts of time — one of them being, for instance, that the past has its own past, present, and future — in her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, published by Prentice-Hall, in 1973.