“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Your sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however. The mass world rises up before your eyes, but your eyes are part of that mass world. You cannot see your thoughts, so you do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do. There are currents of thought as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of man’s feelings and thoughts rise up like flames from a fire, or steam from hot water, to fall like ashes or like rain.

(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.”

(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

(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.

[...] Species were thought to change, and “mutants” form, because of a previous alteration in the environment, to which any given species had to adjust or disappear. [...]

Give us a moment … Historically, of course, you follow a one-line pattern of thought, so you see a picture in which fish left the oceans and became reptiles; from these mammals eventually appeared, and apes and men. [...]