“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:40.) Give us a moment… The phase of death is, then, a part of life’s cycle. I mentioned evolutionary experiments,² as you think of evolution. There is a disease you read about recently, where the skin turns leathery after intense itching — a fascinating development in which the human body tries to form a leathery-like skin that would, if the experiment continued, be flexible enough for, say, sweat pores and normal locomotion, yet tough enough to protect itself in jungle environments from the bites of many “still more dangerous” insects and snakes.³ Many such experiments appear in certain stages as diseases, since the conditions are obviously not normal physical ones. To some extent (underlined twice), cancer also represents a kind of evolutionary experiment. But all such instances escape you because you think of so-called evolution as finished.

Onchocerciasis doesn’t kill, and the percentage of victims who lose their sight varies according to location. We’d like to get more data from Seth on the experimental evolutionary aspects of the blindness, however, since we don’t understand how such a debilitating state could really lead to something better. (Perhaps in this particular biological experiment, the blindness represents an evolutionary dead end, in those terms.) We may ask Seth to elaborate before he finishes Mass Events.

(Pause, then with amusement:) In our next book, we will try to acquaint people with the picture of their true nature as a species, as they exist independently of their belief systems. We will hope to show man’s origin as existing in an inner environment, and emphasize the importance of dreams in “evolutionary advancement,” and as the main origin of man’s most creative achievements.

(9:56 P.M. “Boy, how he got all that out of me, I don’t know,” Jane laughed, for she had been very relaxed before the session. Her delivery had moved right along. I’ve deleted a few portions of the session that don’t apply to disease and evolutionary experimentation. Jane reported that when Seth gave the material on onchocerciasis she “really felt that the people’s skins were trying to turn into some sort of leathery protection. I don’t know whether I got those sensations from Seth, picked them up on my own, or just created them myself to go along with the material.” She hadn’t been aware of any feelings involving her own skin.

(9:35.) There are, therefore, many other equally valid, equally real evolutionary developments that have occurred and are occurring and will occur, all within other probable systems of physical reality. [...]

With splendid innocence and exuberant pride, you imagine that the evolutionary system as you know it is the only one, that physically there can be no more. [...]

No evolutionary line is a dead one. [...]

[...] It seems to you that this is the result of your evolutionary progress—but there have been civilizations upon the earth that specialized in the use of many focuses of consciousness, as for example you are focused upon the use of tools.

[...] I hope to show their practical importance, both as a part of man’s “evolutionary development” and their possibilities in what you think of as modern life. [...]

[...] On the other hand, evolutionary science believes that the universe came into being between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago; that the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old, and that according to the fossil record and other evidence, its living organisms first arose and began evolving at least 3.5 billion years ago. [...]

(9:27.) Your evolutionary science, combined with your psychologists, so served to rob men and women of a sense of dignity and meaning that their problems and difficulties were in a way depersonalized. [...]

(Another point I want to mention in connection with Seth’s material earlier in the session on psychology: His reference on page 3 to “evolutionary science” stems probably from our reading lately an article on Robert Jastrow, an astronomer connected with NASA. [...]

[...] Old ideas of the survival of the fittest, conventional evolutionary processes, gods and goddesses, cannot hope to explain the “mystery of the universe”—but when we use our own abilities gladly and freely, we come so close to being what we are that sometimes we come close to being what the universe is. [...]

Evolutionary thinking is challenged not only by questions of protein synthesis, and energy/entropy (see Note 5), however. [...] The hypothetical evolutionary tree of life demands that such in-between forms existed; it seems that by now paleontologists should have unearthed enough signs of them to make at least a modest case for their belief systems; the lack of scientific evidence is embarrassing. [...]

[...] In evolutionary theory, such attributes violate not only the operation of chance mutation and the struggle for existence, but our ideas of consecutive time [which is associated with “naïve realism” — the belief that things are really as we perceive them to be]. [...]

(I want to add here that our real challenge in knowing our own species, and others, may lie in our cultivating the ability to understand the interacting consciousnesses involved, rather than to search only for physical relationships supposedly created through evolutionary processes. [...]

[...] I also note that he seems to be most unhappy while stressing his agnosticism,²⁰ which is the kind of belief system that perpetuates standard evolutionary doctrines. [...]

[...] But then, for some years Seth has been reiterating that even in our terms there is no well-defined evolutionary path leading from our ancient state to our present one.)

[...] These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs. [...]

It is important that you tie in this evolutionary material with previous data concerning the inner senses. The inner senses were always paramount in evolutionary development, being the impetus behind the physical formations; and themselves, through the use of mental enzymes, imprinting the data contained in the mental genes onto the physical camouflage material.

[...] You can see this in your own system, in a slowed-down version, when you observe the changing forms taken by living matter through its “evolutionary” history.

[...] As I have said before, according to psychology and science, you are a living conglomeration of elements and chemicals, spawned by a universe without purpose, itself accidentally formed, and you are given a life in which all the “primitive and animalistic” drives of your evolutionary past ever lurk within you, awaiting expression and undermining your control.

[...] Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. [...]

Each evolutionary change is preceded and caused by a new idea. [...]

The ability of the entity to transform energy into an idea and then to construct it physically determines the entity’s place on the physical evolutionary plane. [...]

[...] They are in some respects evolutionary developments, being the end portions of the inner senses transformed to some degree, to permit manipulation of camouflage pattern. [...]

If we must speak of layers, and with your propensity for divisions I suppose we must, beneath this you have the racial memories of the species; and contained within is all the evolutionary data. [...]

[...] It’s a pictorial projection of evolutionary trends 50 million years hence. [...]

[...] I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

The limits of identity are arbitrary on your part, developed throughout the stages of your evolutionary process, not for any reason inherent in identity itself, but merely for purely practical reasons on your physical field, having to do with the amount of matter that various kinds of identities could effectively manipulate and control.

(Long pause at 9:02.) The Sinful Self shows itself in a period of transition from its religious to scientific format in science fiction or fantasy in particular, where you can almost trace the translation of religion’s self, tainted by original sin, to the Darwinian and Freudian concepts of the flawed self, bound to destruction one way or another, propelled by the unbridled unconscious or evolutionary defect. [...]

It follows, then, that precognition would be involved in evolutionary alterations, so that the various species would prepare themselves in the present to take on those changes that would be necessary in the future.

There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. [...]