“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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

In Note 7 (also see Note 5), I wrote that for centuries now — most of them obviously preceding Darwin — man himself has been playing the role of a designer through his creation of certain breeds of animals and hybrid plants. But we see now that man is no longer content to bring about changes within species, as in cattle, for instance: With vast excitement he faces the challenge of “engineering” new kinds of life. Those urges are creative even when, as a designer, he goes against his own Darwinian concepts that there is no conscious plan involved in the design of his world.

(The first quotes I’ve put together, then, are from the 44th session for April 15, 1964. In that session Seth gave us his interpretations of some of the basic laws or attributes of the inner universe, but it will be quickly seen that he was really discussing space and time,² as those qualities are perceived in his reality and in ours. In our world, of course, space and time form the environment in which conventional ideas of evolution exist. For that matter, all of the material in this appendix shows the interrelationship between our ideas of serial time and Seth’s simultaneous time. Connected here also is the philosophical concept known as “naïve realism,” which will be discussed briefly later.

[...] In it Seth gave the heading for Section 4, just before finishing his evening’s work with a few minutes of personal information for Jane and me. [...] But I’d say his procedure also helps satisfy Jane’s spontaneous impatience about learning what’s coming next in the material.

[...] 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. Then in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, Seth refers to Adventures on occasion, while I give information about it in Note 3 for his Preface, and Note 5 for Session 680, among others.

[...] His enthusiastic response was one we’d experienced many times before. [...]

[...] (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.)