“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For now think of it as you usually do, in a time context. It has been fashionable in the past to believe that each species was oriented selfishly toward its own survival. Period. Each was seen in competition with all other species. In that framework cooperation was simply a by-product of a primary drive toward survival. One species might use another, for instance. 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. The motivating power was always projected outside* (underlined).

(10:14. The call was from out of town. A young man had finished reading The Seth Material this evening. He had many questions — and was too impatient to finish the letter to Jane that he’d just started. His enthusiastic response was one we’d experienced many times before. I talked to him for a few minutes while Jane rested after coming out of trance, and suggested that he call her later in the week. Resume at 10.36.)

(The atmosphere in our second-story living room was very pleasant and prosaic this evening. We had lights on in the approaching dusk. From the busy intersection just west of our apartment house the sounds of traffic rose up through the open windows. 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.

(As is usually the case in our private sessions, Jane’s Seth voice was only a little deeper than her own regular one. Her Seth accent however, was quite unique. I often think it bears traces of a European heritage — but one that’s impossible to pinpoint by country. Her eyes in trance were much darker, and seemingly without highlights.)

[...] In those terms there was a point where consciousness, through intent, impressed itself into matter. [...] It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce — [all cells are] imbued with the “drive” for value fulfillment — but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life was possible as you think of it; and at that imaginary, hypothetical point, all species became latent. [...] That illumination was everywhere then at every point aware of itself, and of the conditions formed by its presence.

(Even so, as I worked on this appendix I wondered again and again why I was investing so much time in it. [...] I was quite surprised at my reactions. [...]

[...] According to Judaism and Christianity, among many religions, man could seek forgiveness and salvation; he had a soul. After Darwin, he learned that even his physical presence on earth was an accident of nature. He was taught — he taught himself — that ideas of souls and gods were ridiculous. [...]

[...] If science insists that there was, and is, no design or planner behind man’s emergence, then how can man be expected to act as if there was, or is? [...]