“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, there are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life. It appears that there is living matter and nonliving matter, leading to such questions as: “How does nonliving matter become living?”

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions — a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter. There is no point at which consciousness emerged. Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

Ruburt has also been picking up some information, quite interesting, on unusual versions of perception, in which, say, living and nonliving are combined momentarily to form momentarily new kinds of objects. [...]

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. [...] For there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter.

[...] The study of design as one of the links between “living” and “nonliving” systems would certainly be a difficult challenge — but a most rewarding one, I think — for science. [...]

[...] For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

(My position after writing this appendix is that in scientific and religious terms we know little about our world [and universe], its origins, and its amazing variety of forms, both “living” and “nonliving.” [...]

[...] They involve the spontaneous combination of living objects and nonliving ones into curious juxtapositions. [...]

[...] (This isn’t the place to go into it, but Seth maintains that for many reasons we arbitrarily decide what’s living and nonliving.) Each reincarnational self, each counterpart self and probable self has its complement of frameworks. So does the most minute living or nonliving entity and the most gigantic. [...]