“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! As I interpret what I’ve read, Darwin didn’t deny the existence of a god of some kind, but he wanted one that would abolish what he saw as the “upward” struggle for existence. According to the geological/fossil record, this conflict had resulted in the deaths of entire species. Darwin came to believe that he asked the impossible of God. Instead, he assigned the pain and suffering in the world to the impersonal workings of natural selection and chance variation [or genetic mutation]. For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

Illness and suffering are not thrust upon you by God, or by All That Is, or by an outside agency. They are a by-product of the learning process, created by you, in themselves quite neutral … Illness and suffering are the results of the misdirection of creative energy. They are a part of the creative force, however. They do not come from a different source than, say, health and vitality. Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose….

I have mentioned before that everyone within your system is learning to handle this creative energy; and since you are still in the process of doing so, you will often misdirect it. The resulting snarl in activities automatically brings you back to inner questions.

[...] Jane smoked a cigarette and sipped a beer as she waited for the session to start, she was in the process of turning her consciousness inward, actually, on her way to meet Seth in a nonphysical journey that had nothing to do with our ordinary concepts of space or distance.

(9:38.) To return to our main subject of the moment: The fact is that the so-called process of evolution is highly dependent upon the cooperative tendencies inherent in all properties of life and in all species. [...]