“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(I think it more than a coincidence that in these excerpts from Seth Speaks, Seth mentions Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Biblical story of creation in the same sentence, for those systems of belief represent the two poles of the controversy over origins in our modern Western societies: the strictly Darwinistic, mechanistic view of evolution, in which the weakest of any species are ruthlessly eliminated through natural, predatory selection, and the views of the creationists, who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures just as described in the Bible.

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! As I interpret what I’ve read, Darwin didn’t deny the existence of a god of some kind, but he wanted one that would abolish what he saw as the “upward” struggle for existence. According to the geological/fossil record, this conflict had resulted in the deaths of entire species. Darwin came to believe that he asked the impossible of God. Instead, he assigned the pain and suffering in the world to the impersonal workings of natural selection and chance variation [or genetic mutation]. For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

(This kind of material from Seth is deceptively simple, but upon reflection it can be seen to offer much. Jane and I think its implications are often missed by many who write us with questions about the pain and suffering in the world. Undoubtedly Seth has much more to say on the subject, and we hope to eventually obtain that information. Certainly individual and mass beliefs will be involved [along with the natural and unnatural guilt Seth discussed in the sessions making up Chapter 8 of Personal Reality]. I’d say that just understanding the complicated relationships between mass beliefs and illness alone, for example, will require much material from Seth and much time invested upon our parts.

[...] There are groups of people in isolated places who hold such beliefs, and in all such cases the body responds. [...]

1. For those who are interested in publishing matters: Like counterpoint endeavors, Jane’s Dialogues and Adventures have become interwound with her Seth books. [...]