“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.]

(It should be clear, then, that in our camouflage reality the ordinary concept of evolution becomes very complex if one chooses to make it so. The process can be discussed from many viewpoints; Jane and I think that such inquiries could easily “evolve” [to make a pun] into a book, either to bolster Seth’s ideas on the subject, for instance, or to refute them. I now have on file materials that support or reject any stance on evolution that one cares to take. But it never fails, as “they” say: The members of each “pressure group,” whatever its orientation, want to see things their way — very human performances, I’m afraid. Once it’s created, each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals.

(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.

(Seth’s statement just given, that fully developed men coexisted with their supposed ancestors, led to our request that he follow through with more information on the subject. He’s done so to some extent, and here we’re presenting material from one of those later sessions to show his thinking. He continues to confound accepted evolutionary theory. As usual, however, Seth’s new data obviously imply new questions that we haven’t gone into yet. But at least, I told Jane, he’s said certain things that we can ask questions about, whether from the viewpoint of evolution, time, language, civilization, or whatever. The excerpts to follow, incidentally, are those I referred to earlier in this appendix, when I wrote that just as Jane had supplemented Seth’s material on early man with some of her own [as given in Appendix 6 in Volume 1], he in turn added to hers:)

[...] He’s remarked more than once that he’ll close a session by dictating the heading for the next chapter, or whatever, “so that Ruburt [Jane] knows what I am doing. [...]