“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Originally I planned this appendix on evolution to contain just three widely separated excerpts from Seth’s material: an early unpublished session, a few passages in Seth Speaks, and one in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. The appendix, however kept growing as I worked on it; I found myself adding quotations from other sessions, along with comments derived from my own reading and from conversations Jane and I had on the subject.

(I found some of the excerpts, notes, and comments very difficult to assemble and interpret, and others easy to do. The Seth material is incomplete, of course; new information “intrudes” constantly, and in so doing often takes off from a given subject in fresh directions. Some of this process has to do with Jane’s own character: She likes new things, new ideas. Yet in her own way she — and Seth as well — eventually returns to earlier material. Interpretation of old and new together calls for a system of constant correlations, then, and I use that approach as often as I can.

(Seth material on evolution is presented twice in the 582nd session for Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks — not only in the session proper, but from an ESP class delivery given a few days later, on April 27, 1971. In class, Seth discussed Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution,⁷ and that material, some of which wasn’t published in the 582nd session is the source for my second group of excerpts:)

(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.

[...] She discussed her “own” works in her Introduction to Personal Reality. I mention them in various notes in that book, and selections of poetry from Dialogues itself are presented in chapters 10 and 11; in the latter chapter Seth used one of those excerpts in connection with his own material. [...]

[...] In this present volume, perhaps in an appendix, I hope to add excerpts from some of Seth’s unpublished observations on the psychological bridge linking Jane and himself. [...]