“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.]

(And a decade later we’re still unraveling that tale, with Seth’s help. I’ll digress here for a moment to note that we expect to be so occupied for the rest of our lives: The intellectual and emotional challenges posed by the Seth material are practically unlimited.

(Within that temporal framework investigators have recently discovered great biochemical differences among human beings at the molecular level: The genetic structures of numerous proteins [see Note 5] have been shown to be much more varied than was suspected. Even more pronounced are the differences among proteins between species. Each of us is seen to be truly unique — but at the same time those studying biological evolution express concern about whether their discoveries will challenge Darwinistic beliefs. Instead, I think that what has been learned so far offers only possible variations within the idea of evolution, for the talk is still about the origin of life out of nonlife, followed by the climb up the scale of living complexity; most evolutionists think that natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, still applies.

(I want to add here that our real challenge in knowing our own species, and others, may lie in our cultivating the ability to understand the interacting consciousnesses involved, rather than to search only for physical relationships supposedly created through evolutionary processes. The challenge is profound. The consciousnesses of numerous other species may be so different from ours that we only approximately grasp the meanings inherent in some of them, and miss the essences of others entirely. To give just two examples, at this time we are surely opaque to the seemingly endless search for value fulfillment that consciousness displays through the “lowly” lung fish and the “unattractive” cockroach. Yet those entities are quite immune to our notions of evolution, and they explore time contexts in ways far beyond our current human comprehension. As far as science knows, both have existed with very little change for over 300 million years.

(In the current literature I read that a typical famous scientist — one of many leaders expressing such views these days — is very pessimistic about the state of the human species, given its many dilemmas. I also note that he seems to be most unhappy while stressing his agnosticism,²⁰ which is the kind of belief system that perpetuates standard evolutionary doctrines. Building upon those limited assumptions, the individual in question tells us how ironic it is that the “new” portions of the human brain, those that have evolved within the last two million years, are responsible for the moral and technological problems our species now faces. The brain’s great creative neocortex is held especially accountable for problems that may lead to humanity’s self-destruction. None of these challenges, as Jane and I habitually call them, are seen as distorted expressions of the kind of creativity Seth has described many times.²¹

2. As I wrote in the Introductory Notes for Volume I of “Unknown” Reality, “I think it important to periodically remind the reader of certain of Seth’s basic ideas throughout both volumes….” His simultaneous time, or spacious present, is certainly such a concept. Yet in the next paragraph I added that in my opinion, “Seth’s concept of simultaneous time will always elude us to some extent as long as we’re physical creatures….” To me the challenge of confronting that idea is well worthwhile, however, for to grasp it even partially is bound to enlarge one’s view of reality.

However, Jane and I believe that at most the “facts of evolution” make up a working hypothesis — or unproven proposition — only, for many of evolution’s tenets, especially those involving energy/entropy (see Note 6), are open to serious challenge. There’s plenty of evidence around for changes occurring within species, but the “upward” transmutation of one species into another has not been scientifically proven from the index fossil record, nor has it been experimentally verified. The arguments about evolution can get very technical, so in my notes I’m referring to those aspects of the subject in the barest terms possible.

It’s often been claimed that Darwin’s natural selection, while ruling out any question of design or a planner — God, say — behind living matter, leaves unexplained the same question relative to the structure of nonliving matter, which in those terms obviously preceded life. I’d rather approach that argument through another statement Seth made in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks (in the 582nd session): “You are biologically connected, chemically connected with the Earth that you know….” How is it that as living creatures we’re made up of ingredients — atoms of iron, molecules of water, for instance — from a supposedly dead world? In the scientific view we’re utterly dependent upon that contradictory situation. No one denies the amazing structure or design of our physical universe, from the scale of subatomic particles on “up” (regardless of what cosmological theory is used to explain the universe’s beginning). The study of design as one of the links between “living” and “nonliving” systems would certainly be a difficult challenge — but a most rewarding one, I think — for science. I have little idea of how the work would be carried out. Evidently it would lead from biology through microbiology to physics with, ultimately, a search that at least approached Seth’s electromagnetic energy (EE) units and units of consciousness (CU’s). Yet according to Seth, both classes of “particles” are in actuality nonphysical; as best words can note, they have their realities on scales so minute that we cannot hope to detect them through our present technology….

Evolutionary thinking is challenged not only by questions of protein synthesis, and energy/entropy (see Note 5), however. Equally insistent are the puzzles posed by the missing intermediate forms in the fossil record: Where are all the remnants of those creatures that linked birds, reptiles, cats, monkeys, and human beings? The hypothetical evolutionary tree of life demands that such in-between forms existed; it seems that by now paleontologists should have unearthed enough signs of them to make at least a modest case for their belief systems; the lack of scientific evidence is embarrassing. Since my mind works that way, I could make minutely detailed drawings of a graduated series of such entities (gradualism being a basic premise in Charles Darwin’s theory), but would the creatures shown have been viable? Could they actually have existed for the necessary millennia while evolving into the species whose fossil remains have been discovered, or that live today? As indicated in Note 5, evolutionists are serving goodly portions of speculation along with inadequate theory — or, really, hypothesis.

In Note 7 (also see Note 5), I wrote that for centuries now — most of them obviously preceding Darwin — man himself has been playing the role of a designer through his creation of certain breeds of animals and hybrid plants. But we see now that man is no longer content to bring about changes within species, as in cattle, for instance: With vast excitement he faces the challenge of “engineering” new kinds of life. Those urges are creative even when, as a designer, he goes against his own Darwinian concepts that there is no conscious plan involved in the design of his world.