“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your terms, consciousness of self did not develop because of any exterior circumstances in which your species won out, so to speak. In fact, that consciousness of self in any person is dependent upon the constant, miraculous cooperations that exist between the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds.³ The inner intent always forms any exterior alteration. This applies on any scale you use. Consciousness forms the environment. The environment itself is conscious (forcefully). Atoms and molecules themselves operate in their own fields of probabilities. In their own ways, they “yearn” toward all probable developments. When they form living creatures they become a physical basis for species alteration. The body’s adaptability is not simply an adjusting mechanism or quality. The cells have inner capabilities that you have not discovered. They contain within themselves memory of all the “previous” forms they have been a part of.

4. Jane and I understand Seth’s point when he tells us that “the cells of a man or woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal.” However, for the reasons given in Note 3 for Session 687, in Volume 1, we’d rather think of the molecular components of cells as participating in the structures of a variety of forms. (And I can note a week later that at the end of Session 707, Seth makes his own comment about cells surviving changes of form.)

For now think of it as you usually do, in a time context. It has been fashionable in the past to believe that each species was oriented selfishly toward its own survival. Period. Each was seen in competition with all other species. In that framework cooperation was simply a by-product of a primary drive toward survival. One species might use another, for instance. Species were thought to change, and “mutants” form, because of a previous alteration in the environment, to which any given species had to adjust or disappear. The motivating power was always projected outside* (underlined).

I would like to make an aside here: In certain terms, you cannot destroy life by a nuclear disaster. You would of course destroy life as you know it, and in your terms bring to an end, if the conditions were right (or wrong), life forms with which you are familiar. In greater terms, however, mutant life would emerge — mutant only by your standards — but life quite natural to itself.

[...] 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 those terms the environment forms the species and the species form the environment. [...]

[...] It has a validity within very limited perspectives only; for consciousness does, indeed, evolve form. Form does not evolve consciousness. [...]

[...] [An undetermined number of scientists hold creationist views, by the way, but I have no statistics to offer on how many do.] The Bible certainly advocates at least a relative immutability of species, rather than a common ancestry in which a single cell evolved into a variety of ever more complex and divergent forms. [...] Theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists, for example, try to bring the two extremes closer together through postulating various methods by which God created the world and then, while remaining hidden, either helped it to evolve to its present state in the Darwinistic tradition, or, through a series of creative acts, brought forth each succeeding “higher” form of life.

[...] 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. [...]