“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I certainly do not hold creationist views [see Note 1]. As I wrote near the beginning of this appendix, to go very far into religious history would lead away from the subject matter I planned to cover; but to us science is as far away from Seth’s philosophy in one direction as religion is in the opposite direction. The species’ religious drives have been around a lot longer than its scientific ones, however, so I found myself looking for broad correlations between the two, in that under each value system the individual carries a very conscious sense of personal vulnerability. Before Darwinism, to use that concept as an example, man at least felt that God had put him on earth for certain purposes, no matter how much man distorted those purposes through ignorance and war. According to Judaism and Christianity, among many religions, man could seek forgiveness and salvation; he had a soul. After Darwin, he learned that even his physical presence on earth was an accident of nature. He was taught — he taught himself — that ideas of souls and gods were ridiculous. Either way, this very fallible creature found himself vulnerable to forces that consciously he couldn’t understand — even though, in Seth’s view, down through the millennia man had chosen all of his religious and antireligious experiences.

The earth has gone through entire cycles unsuspected by your scientists. Modern man, then, existed with other manlike species, and appeared in many different places on the earth, and at different ages.

(Even so, as I worked on this appendix I wondered again and again why I was investing so much time in it. The answers proved to be simple once I understood. Then I ended up shocked to discover how little real evidence there is to back up the idea of evolution, and fascinated by the limits of scientific thinking. I was quite surprised at my reactions. Somehow Jane and I always understood, to make an analogy, that Seth’s kind of “simultaneous” reincarnation [or anyone else’s kind, for that matter] wasn’t acceptable in our Western societies at this time in history; we could trace out many reasons why this is so. But some time passed before I realized that our ruling intellectual establishments were advancing notions about evolution that were not proven in scientific terms — then teaching these “facts” to succeeding generations. Finally, the humor of the whole situation got through to me: As some have very clearly noted, in the biological and earth sciences especially, circular reasoning often predominates: The theory of evolution is used to prove the theory of evolution.

(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.

[...] Physically speaking, earth itself has its own kind of gestalt consciousness. If you must, then think of that earth consciousness as grading (spelled) upward in great slopes of awareness from relatively “inert” particles of dust and stone through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. [...]