“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

2. When I come across material that puts down the physical body, I sometimes try to counter such negative projections by turning to one of the technological accomplishments of our “degraded” species: I study photographs of minute portions of the human body, taken with a scanning electron microscope. Then I experience a series of steps in thinking — not all of them good, I’m afraid — and I’d like to mention each one in turn.

At this writing, an electron microscope can magnify the surfaces of tissue samples from 20,000 to 60,000 times. Always the resulting photographs obtained leave me groping as I try to appreciate the beauty, order, and complexity of the human organism at just the greatly enlarged levels shown. (If we could plunge “down” into the body’s molecular and atomic stages, and see those, we’d find intricacies that are even more unbelievable.)

Yet, the awe I invariably feel when I study a microphotograph of the retina of the eye, magnified “only” 20,000 times, is hardly an unalloyed blessing. For next I wonder how the human creature, whose bodily components each possess such a ceaseless, rational integrity, can often function so irrationally as a whole, through the creation of war, poverty, pollution, disease, and so forth. Jane and I hope that her work with Seth is offering insights into these enormous questions about our species’ individual and collective behavior. Surely we don’t think that atoms or cells, or livers or eyeballs, are irrational.

Finally, the incredibly complex physical assemblage of the human being — or of any organism, to confine ourselves to just “living” entities — always reminds me that according to evolutionary theory life on earth arose by chance alone. We must remember that through Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism science tells us that life has no creative design, or any purpose, behind it; and that, moreover, this ineffable quality called “life” originated (more than 3.4 billion years ago) in a single fortuitous chance combination of certain atoms and molecules in a tidal pool, say, somewhere on the face of the planet….