“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our beliefs and intents cause us to pick “from an unpredictable group of actions,” or probabilities, those that we want to happen, as Seth tells us in the 681st session in Volume 1; therefore, from my physically oriented probability the considerable work I’ve put into this paper is an examination of evolution in connection with a number of Seth’s concepts. Religious questions connected with evolution aren’t stressed as much as some might like, although they aren’t ignored either — but to go very far into religious history would lead away from the focus I’ve chosen.

(To a student:) Now last week, when Ruburt [Jane] was speaking about the natives who are such expert dreamers, you asked: “But why are they not more progressive?” Yet I know you realize that your own progress as a civilization will, in your terms, come to a halt unless you advance in other directions. This is what your civilization is learning that you cannot rape your planet, that life did not begin as some isolated [substance] that in the great probabilities of existence met another [similar substance], and another, and then another, until a chain of molecules could be made and selves formed. Using an analogy, neither does consciousness exist as simple organisms separated by vast distances, but as a complicated gestalt.

(Over a year later Jane supplemented such remarks by Seth with some trance material of her “own”; see Appendix 6 in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. According to her, if man didn’t emerge from the animals, there were certainly close relationships involved — a dance of probabilities between the two, as it were. As I noted at the beginning of this appendix, the Seth material is still incomplete, and new information requires constant correlation with what has come before. Jane’s own material — including whatever she comes up with in the future — ought to be integrated with Seth’s, also, and eventually we hope to find time to do this. Although she left Appendix 6 unfinished, it contains many ideas worth more study: “Some of the experiments with man-animals didn’t work out along our historic lines, but the ghost memories of those probabilities still linger in our biological structure … The growth of ego consciousness by itself set up both challenges and limitations … For many centuries there was no clear-cut differentiation between various aspects of man and animal … there were parallel developments in the emergence of physical man … there were innumerable species of man-in-the-making in your terms….” [I can add that just as Jane supplemented Seth’s material on early man, he in turn has added to hers in a kind of freewheeling exchange; his information is presented later in this appendix.]

In thinking in terms of consecutive time, however, evolution does not march from the past into the future. Instead, precognitively the species is aware of those changes it wants to make, and from the “future” it alters the “present” state of the chromosomes and genes (see Note 14) 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, as physically you manipulate matter.⁹

(Seth’s ideas aside for the moment, biologists faithful to Darwin’s theories don’t want to hear anything about the precognitive abilities of a species, nor do they see any evidence of it in their work. In evolutionary theory, such attributes violate not only the operation of chance mutation and the struggle for existence, but our ideas of consecutive time [which is associated with “naïve realism” — the belief that things are really as we perceive them to be]. Not that scientifically the concept of a far more flexible time — even a backward flow of time — is all that new. In atomic physics, for example, no special meaning or place is given to any particular moment, and fundamentally the past and future all but merge in the interactions of elementary particles — thus at least approaching Seth’s simultaneous time.¹⁰ At that level there’s change, or value fulfillment, but no evolution. To Jane’s and my way of thinking, if there’s value fulfillment there’s consciousness, expressed through CU’s, or units of consciousness.

(I’m projecting my own ideas here, but I think that in all of its complexity DNA has motives for its physical existence [as mediated through Seth’s CU’s, or units of consciousness] that considerably enlarge upon its assigned function as the “master molecule” of life as we know it. Deoxyribonucleic acid may exist within its host, whether man, plant, or animal — or bacteria or virus — in cooperative altruistic ventures with its carrier that are quite beside purely survival ones. Some of those goals, such as the exploration of concepts like the moment point [see Note 11], or probabilities [and reincarnation¹⁶], really defy our ordinary conscious perception. In terms we can more easily grasp, social relationships within and between species may be explored, starting at that biochemical level and working “upward.” Basically, then, an overall genetics of cooperation becomes a truer long-run concept than the postulated deadly struggle for survival of the fittest, whether between man and molecules, say, or among members of the same species. Once again we have consciousness seeking to know itself in as many ways as possible, while being aware all of the time, in those terms, of the forthcoming “death” of its medium of expression, DNA, and of DNA’s host, or “physical machine.”

(I continue my projections by writing that to a molecule of DNA the conventional notion of evolution — could such an entity grasp that idea, or even want to — might be hilarious indeed, given its own enhanced time scheme.¹⁷ Actually it would be more to the point if perhaps with the aid of hypnosis and/or visualization, we tried from our giant-sized viewpoints to touch such minute consciousnesses with our own,¹⁸ and so extend our knowledge in unexpected ways. Some probable realities might be reached — potential conscious achievements that I think are already within the reach of certain gifted individuals, Jane among them.¹⁹ Jane and I would rather say that the variability among humans [or the members of any other species] at the molecular level is a reflection of Seth’s statement that we each create our own reality, with all that that implies.

(I repeat that when Seth discusses evolution his meaning differs considerably from the scientific one — which, with various modifications, is even accepted by a number of religious thinkers. As I show at the end of this appendix, Seth allows for a much greater range of simultaneous origins; in our reality these imply growth and development out of that “basic” group of species for the most part, with multidimensional purposes operating inside an enhanced time scheme that includes probabilities, reincarnation, counterparts,²² precognition, and other concepts, meanings, and beliefs. All of these qualities are manifestations of All That Is, or consciousness, or energy, or whatever. Probabilities aside, when Seth talks about cells [or their components] recombining as parts of plant or animal forms, as he does in the 705th session, Jane and I don’t take that to mean the evolution, or alteration, of one species into another — but that a unity of consciousness pervades all elements in our environment, whether “alive” or “dead.” With the concept of probabilities in mind, however, much of the “thrust for development and change” that Seth also mentions as existing inside all organisms, could just as well take place in those other realities. Early in this appendix, I described how Seth continually built upon material that he’d given before, and that processes of correlation between old and new resulted. At this time, my ideas here represent a correlation between Seth’s material on evolution in the 705th session [which led to this appendix], and his later statements on origins, referred to above. We hope to learn much more about the whole business of evolution. And behind all, Seth insists upon the condition that each of us chose to experience this camouflage reality within this historical context.

9. Seth prepared the way for these statements by declaring in the 684th session, in Volume 1: “It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. Neither statement would be precisely correct in any case, because your present is a poised balance affected as much by the probable future as the probable past.”

11. Both of these references originate in the first volume of this work. Seth, in Session 681: “In your terms — the phrase is necessary — the moment point, the present, is the point of interaction between all existences and reality. All probabilities flow through it, though one of your moment points may be experienced as centuries, or as a breath, in other probable realities of which you are a part.” Also see notes 1 and 5 for the same session.

12. I’m not sure how something like naïve realism fits in with out-of-body travel (or “projection”), however. I’ve read nothing about the two together, nor have I yet asked Seth for what will surely be some very interesting material on such a possible relationship. Paradoxically, our perceptions while out-of-body can be more tenuously connected to temporal reality than usual, yet more acute at the same time. I was aware of the accustomed physical world during a projection that’s described in Seth Speaks (see the 583rd session in Chapter 20), and in some other dream-connected out-of-body situations. However, our use of naïve realism must often govern what we allow ourselves to experience while consciousness is separated from the body. I also think that some out-of-body travels, apparently to “alien” nonphysical realities, may actually be based instead upon interior bodily states or events. But there are times when the projecting consciousness, free of frameworks like naïve realism, at least approaches truly different realities, or probabilities. Jane has had some success here; in Chapter 6 of Adventures, see her projection experience involving “Dr. Sam’s house.”

“The physical world that you recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are ‘plastic,’ in that while they exist, their final form is a matter of probabilities directed by consciousness. Your senses perceive these patterns in their own way. The patterns themselves can be ‘activated’ in innumerable fashions. (Humorously:) There is something out there to observe.

“… these patterns of probabilities themselves are not inactive. They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized (with a hyphen). Behind all realities there are mental states. These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those you recognize.”

16. In this appendix I’ve consistently thought of probabilities and reincarnation as being nearly synonymous, while hardly mentioning the latter to avoid making the material unnecessarily complicated. As Seth himself told us in the 683rd session for Volume 1 of this work: “Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context — portions of the self that are materialized in historical contexts.”

17. These excerpts from Seth’s material in the 690th session, for Volume 1, furnish a close analogy to the sort of “time” available to molecular consciousness: “… biological precognition is firmly based in the chromosomes and genes, and reflected in the cells … The cells’ practically felt ‘Now’ includes, then, what you 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.’”

19. Jane described one of her adventures with probable realities in Appendix 4 for Volume 1: She tuned in to her own “sidepools of consciousness,” her own “probable neurological materializations….” (My personal opinion is that although many may think it difficult reading, Appendix 4 contains some of the most important information in Volume 1.)