“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(For the most part Seth’s ideas are far away from thoughts of replicating genes or the second law of thermodynamics. Through Jane, he grapples with the mysteries of existence in emotional terms, rather than through the impersonal, “scientific,” and really unproven concepts that life originated by accident [more than 3.4 billion years ago,⁸ to give a late estimate], and perpetuates itself through chance mutations. Darwin’s objective thinking, then, cut him off from such comprehensions as Seth advocates. The same was true for many scientists and theistic thinkers in succeeding generations, and in my opinion this holds today. I suggest that the entire 634th session in Personal Reality be read with this appendix, for in it Seth explored some connections between animal and man — including the evolution [my emphasis] by man of “certain animal capacities to their utmost.” At practically the same time, in the 637th session for the following chapter [9], he could tell us: “Note: I did not say that man emerged from the animals.”

In thinking in terms of consecutive time, however, evolution does not march from the past into the future. Instead, precognitively the species is aware of those changes it wants to make, and from the “future” it alters the “present” state of the chromosomes and genes (see Note 14) to bring about in the probable future the specific changes it desires. Both above and below your usual conscious focus, then, time is experienced in an entirely different fashion, and is constantly manipulated, as physically you manipulate matter.⁹

(Any role that consciousness might play in such biochemical processes isn’t considered, of course, nor is there any sort of mystical comprehension of what we’re up to as creatures. No matter how beautifully man works out a hypothesis or theory, he still does so without any thought of consciousness coming first. Through the habitual (and perhaps unwitting) use of naïve realism, he projects his own basic creativity outside of himself or any of his parts. He also projects upon cellular components like genes and DNA¹⁴ learned concepts of “protection” and “selfishness”: DNA is said to care only about its own survival and “knowledge,” and not whether its host is man, plant, or animal. Only man would think to burden such pervasive parts of his own being, and those of other entities, with such negative concepts! Jane and I don’t believe the allegations — in its own terms, how could the very stuff controlling inheritance not care about the nature of what it created? I’m only half joking (is there a gene for humor?) when I protest that DNA, for example, doesn’t deserve to be regarded in such a fashion, no matter how much we push it around through recombinant techniques.¹⁵

14. Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is often referred to as the “master molecule,” or the “basic building block” of life. DNA is an essential component of the protoplasmic substance of which genes and chromosomes are formed in the cell nucleus, and governs the heredity of all living things.

17. These excerpts from Seth’s material in the 690th session, for Volume 1, furnish a close analogy to the sort of “time” available to molecular consciousness: “… biological precognition is firmly based in the chromosomes and genes, and reflected in the cells … The cells’ practically felt ‘Now’ includes, then, what you think of as past and future, as simple conditions of Nowness. They maintain the body’s structure in your poised time only by manipulating themselves in a rich medium of probabilities. There is a constant give-and-take of communication between the cell as you know it in present time, and the cell as it ‘was’ in the past, or ‘will be.’”