“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your idea of space is some completely erroneous conception of an emptiness to be filled. Things — planets, stars, nebulae — come into being in this physical [camouflage] universe of yours, according to your latest theories, and this universe expands — pushed so that its sides bulge, so to speak the outer galaxies literally bursting into nowhere. True inner space is to the contrary vital energy, itself alive, possessing abilities of transformation, forming all existences, even the camouflage reality with which you are familiar, and which you attempt to probe so ineffectively.

The second law of the inner universe is energy transformation.⁶ This occurs constantly. Energy transformation and value fulfillment, both existing within the spacious present [or at once], add up to a durability that is at the same time spontaneous … and simultaneous.

Durability is our fourth law. Durability within the framework of the spacious present would not exist were it not for the laws of value fulfillment and energy transformation. These make duration within the spacious present not only possible but necessary….

Illness and suffering are not thrust upon you by God, or by All That Is, or by an outside agency. They are a by-product of the learning process, created by you, in themselves quite neutral … Illness and suffering are the results of the misdirection of creative energy. They are a part of the creative force, however. They do not come from a different source than, say, health and vitality. Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose….

I have mentioned before that everyone within your system is learning to handle this creative energy; and since you are still in the process of doing so, you will often misdirect it. The resulting snarl in activities automatically brings you back to inner questions.

At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life-energy they share, and are not — in those terms — jealous for their own individuality … Man, pursuing his own way, chose to step outside of that framework — on a conscious level….

(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.

At the same time, EE units (see Note 3) became manifest. I have said, for example, that the universe expands as an idea does, and so the visible universe sprang into being in the same manner. The same energy that gave birth to the universe is, in those terms, still being created. The EE units contain within themselves the latent knowledge of all of the various species that can emerge under those conditions. It is according to your relative position. You can say that it took untold centuries for the EE units to “initially” combine, forming classifications of matter and various species, or you can say that this process happened at once. In your terms, each species is aware of the condition of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species form the environment. There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors.

[However, as] you begin to question the nature of time itself, then the “when” of the universe is beside the point. The motion and energy of the universe still comes from within. I certainly realize that this is hardly a scientific statement — yet the moment that All That Is conceived of a physical system it was invisibly created, endowed with creativity, and bound to emerge [into physical reality].

3. In this 1964 session, Seth was several years away from any attempt to elaborate upon the vitality that “composes from itself all other phenomena.” In October 1969 he began his material on EE (electromagnetic energy) units. These, he declared, exist just below the range of physical matter, and accrete in response to emotional intensity; eventually, they form physical objects. See sessions 504–6 in the Appendix of The Seth Material, and the 581st session (held in April 1971) in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks.

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.

6. Ever since Seth came through with the material in this (44th) session 10 years ago, I’ve been interested in comparing his second law of the inner universe with the second law of thermodynamics of our “camouflage” physical sciences. Both deal with energy, yet to me they’re opposites. At the same time I see them as linked through our distorted perception of that inner reality, thus pointing up Seth’s statement just given, that “the so-called laws of your camouflage universe do not apply to the inner universe.” (When this session was held Jane knew nothing of the three laws of thermodynamics, or how they define energy/heat relationships in our universe. Nor is she concerned with them now, per se; they’re simply outside of her interests.)

Seth has always maintained that there are no closed systems, that energy is constantly exchanged between them, regardless of whether such transfers can be detected. (In Volume 1, see Session 688, plus Note 2 for the same session.) The second law of thermodynamics, on the other hand, tell us that our universe is a closed system — and that it’s fated to eventually run down because the amount of energy available for useful work is always decreasing, even though the supply of that energy is constant. A measure of this unavailable energy is called entropy.

I think it obvious that by “energy transformation” Seth doesn’t mean that the energy (or consciousness, to my way of thinking) in our system is inevitably decreasing. I can best express it intuitively: In physics, that well-known second law of thermodynamics may usually be so reliable for us, distorted as it is, just because of our limited physical interpretation as mediated by the central nervous system.

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….

In connection with material in this note, I think it quite interesting and revealing that several millennia before Darwin, man himself began playing the role of a designer within the framework of nature, through his selective breeding of animals and his hybridization of plants. These activities certainly represent evolution through conscious intent, guided by the same creature who insists that no sort of consciousness could have been responsible for the origin or development of “life,” let alone the “dead” matter of his planet. Not only that: We read that even now in his laboratories man is trying hard to create some of that life itself. This is always done, of course, with the idea that the right combination of simple ingredients (water, methane, ammonia, et al.) in the test tube, stimulated by the right kind of energy under just the right conditions, will automatically produce life. It’s confidently predicted that eventually at least one such experiment will succeed. I have yet to see in those accounts anything about the role consciousness will play in this truly miraculous conversion of dead matter into that of the living. Perhaps those involved in the experiments fear that the idea of consciousness will impugn the scientific “purity” of their work.

Nor can solar energy be thought of as the agent that directly turned nonliving matter into its living counterpart; in those terms, life required its intermediate molecules, which sunlight is not able to construct. Life needs protein in order to “be,” and to sustain it through metabolism — then it can use solar energy! Darwin’s theory that life arose by chance poses a basic contradiction: What made the protein that sustains the processes of life, before that life was present to make the protein?

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.