“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Even so, as I worked on this appendix I wondered again and again why I was investing so much time in it. The answers proved to be simple once I understood. Then I ended up shocked to discover how little real evidence there is to back up the idea of evolution, and fascinated by the limits of scientific thinking. I was quite surprised at my reactions. Somehow Jane and I always understood, to make an analogy, that Seth’s kind of “simultaneous” reincarnation [or anyone else’s kind, for that matter] wasn’t acceptable in our Western societies at this time in history; we could trace out many reasons why this is so. But some time passed before I realized that our ruling intellectual establishments were advancing notions about evolution that were not proven in scientific terms — then teaching these “facts” to succeeding generations. Finally, the humor of the whole situation got through to me: As some have very clearly noted, in the biological and earth sciences especially, circular reasoning often predominates: The theory of evolution is used to prove the theory of evolution.

(And a decade later we’re still unraveling that tale, with Seth’s help. I’ll digress here for a moment to note that we expect to be so occupied for the rest of our lives: The intellectual and emotional challenges posed by the Seth material are practically unlimited.

(It should be clear, then, that in our camouflage reality the ordinary concept of evolution becomes very complex if one chooses to make it so. The process can be discussed from many viewpoints; Jane and I think that such inquiries could easily “evolve” [to make a pun] into a book, either to bolster Seth’s ideas on the subject, for instance, or to refute them. I now have on file materials that support or reject any stance on evolution that one cares to take. But it never fails, as “they” say: The members of each “pressure group,” whatever its orientation, want to see things their way — very human performances, I’m afraid. Once it’s created, each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals.

(But, I asked Jane recently, why do our sciences and religions take it all so seriously? I wasn’t really too earnest. If we truly owe our physical existence to the chance conglomeration of certain atoms and molecules in the thickening scum of a primordial pond or ocean [to discuss only mankind here], then certainly we’ll never come this way again in the universe; and moreover, our emotional and intellectual attributes must rest upon the same dubious beginning. Aside from the lack of evidence to back up such “scientific” speculations, what thinking or feeling values, I wonder, can make such a belief system so attractive? Surely very limited ones in linear terms, fated to never get beyond those incessant questions about what came before the beginning. To paraphrase some other material Jane wrote not long ago: “But the earth and all upon it are given. To imagine that such an entire environment is an accident is intellectually outrageous and emotionally sterile.”

(For some years now, organized religion as a whole has been suffering from a loss of faith and members, stripped of its mysteries by science, which, with the best of intentions, offers in religion’s place a secular humanism — the belief that one doesn’t need blind faith in a god in order to be morally concerned for the common welfare; paradoxically, however, this concern is most of the time expressed in religious terms, or with religious feeling. Yet science too has experienced many failures in theory and technology, and knows a new humility; at least partly because of these failures, anti-intellectualism has grown noticeably in recent years.