“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One of the main attributes of this value climate is spontaneity, which shows itself in the existence of the only sort of time that has any real meaning — that of the spacious present.

Growth in your camouflage universe often involves the taking up of more space. Actually, in our inner universe … growth exists in terms of the value or quality expansion of which I have spoken, and does not — I repeat — does not imply any sort of space expansion. Nor does it imply, as growth does in your camouflage universe, a sort of projection into time.

(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.

(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

(However, collectively we do share an agreed-upon reality, even if one subject to many stresses. The next two excerpts to be presented from Seth came through in a couple of sessions delivered some time after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality. I’ve put them together for easy reading. Their inspiration was my work here and the discussions on evolution that Jane and I led in ESP class. As noted with the quotations given in Note 13, eventually this material will be published in its entirety as part of a Seth book; perhaps then it can be used as a guide for the sort of investigation just mentioned. In the meantime, the thoughts below can at least help orient some fresh thinking about the beginning of our planet, of all the species upon it, and indeed of the universe itself. Seth began:)

(The search, then, is on for new unities and meanings; a convergence, one might say, of the realities of science, nature, religion — and, of course, mysticism. By mysticism I mean simply the intuitional penetration of our camouflage reality to achieve deeper understandings relative to our physical and mental environments — and such comprehensions are what Jane seeks to accomplish through her expression of the Seth material.²⁵ In that sense, it isn’t necessary here to discuss attaining “ultimate” knowledge — it will be enough to note that as one person Jane can use her abilities to help unify a number of viewpoints. She can also bring to consciousness the idea that no matter what our individual orientations may be, collectively we do have overall purposes in the world we’ve created. This realization alone can be a transforming one; as I show in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, it can be a most useful one in practical, everyday life as well. Within that sort of framework, the evolution referred to by Seth — in whatever way it may concern the development of ideas, planets, creatures, or anything else — makes sense.)

5. According to my interpretation of this sentence, Seth stops short of telling us that in our reality all species — man, animals, and plant life (and viruses and bacteria too, for that matter) — developed from a single primordial living source. Evolutionary theory maintains that such a source spontaneously came into being, riding upon various protein molecules (or certain other kinds of molecules) that had themselves chemically — and miraculously — evolved out of nonliving matter, then demonstrated the ability to duplicate themselves. (When Seth came through with this 44th session, neither Jane nor I had enough background information about theories of evolution to ask him to be more specific. Proteins, for instance, are very complex chains of amino acids, and consist of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and/or certain other elements. They exist in great variety in all animal and vegetable matter; in the body each protein supports a very definite function.) But the view that all life had a common origin, that by pure chance it originated on the earth — just once — without the aid of God, or any sort of designer, is today accepted by most scientists in biology and related disciplines. Such thinking stems from the work done in the 19th century by the English naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

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.

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.’”