“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now this is a mental camera we are using. There is a knack about being a good dream photographer, and you must learn how to operate the camera. In physical life, for example, a photographer knows that many conditions affect the picture he takes. Exterior situations then are important: You might get a very poor picture on a dark day, for instance. With our dream camera, however, the conditions themselves are mental. If you are in a dark mood, for example, then your picture of inner reality might be dim, poorly outlined, or foreboding. This would not necessarily mean that the dream itself had tragic overtones, simply that it was taken in the “poor light” of the psyche’s mood.

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.

Next, I ask myself how such a marvelously structured being can think of its image as inferior to anything, especially since we’re far from understanding it even on a “mere” physical basis, let alone from any sort of nonphysical standpoint. Jane’s own abilities, for instance, raise questions about certain biological attributes as well as mental ones; in large part our society still doesn’t want to contend with such challenges at this time.

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.

Aside from whatever difficulties I may have about resolving the internal beauties of our physical construction with our external behavior, I hope my deep skepticism about this little “official” scenario on evolution is apparent here. See Appendix 12.