“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Science worships skepticism, unless skepticism is applied to science, its hypotheses, procedures, or methods. What we need are more skeptics who are not afraid to judge the claims of science with the same fine discrimination used to examine other alternate disciplines and fields of endeavor. Like The New York Times, science publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” meaning all of the news that fits into the officially-accepted view of reality. That news is already invisibly censored, and yet we’re supposed to live our lives in accordance with that official definition of experience.

So far, metaphysics has only been entertainment, a step-science of our culture; part of the extended family of science for the purposes of inspiration and ideas, but not given credit as scientific truth. Frowned upon. Even feared.

Science arose out of a religious world that was filled with “witchcraft.” It began as a protection from, and a defense against, some of the mysteries of the natural world. It has since found itself denying the realities it arose to tame.

Jane Roberts and Robert Butts have had letters from scientists of all kinds, many of them academics. In some ways the Seth material has been given credit by the establishment; being taught as university course work, for example. But often readers have been afraid to admit publicly that they have found truth in metaphysical sources. They have been trapped by the boundaries of what science has so far accepted into its family: an ethnocentrically perfect “set” of beliefs, with metaphysical mysteries denied, avoided, or written out.

[...] However, there are indeed many kinds of science. There are a number of sciences dealing just with locomotion. [...] (With amusement:) I am making this point because I want it made plain — this, dear Joseph, is a pun — that when I speak of science on another plane I may not speak of the plain old science that you know.

[...] When sciences progress on various planes, then visitations become less accidental and more planned. Once the inhabitants of a plane have learned mental-science patterns, then they are to a great degree freed from the more regular camouflage [physical] patterns. This applies to “higher” planes than mine, generally speaking, although mine is further along in these sciences than your own.

[Many of] the flying saucer appearances come from [such] a plane, [one] that is much more advanced in technological sciences than earth at this time. However, this is still not a mental-science plane. [...]

[...] As science advances on various planes the inhabitants learn to travel between planes occasionally, while carrying with them the [camouflage] manifestations of their home stations …

When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. [...] Science’s reasons are given as the only true statements of reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations of counter-versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can safely channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. [...]

(9:36.) This is the reason why some scientists who either write or read science fiction, are the most incensed over any suggestion that some such ideas represent a quite valid alternate conception of reality. In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much to fear from the free intellect as religion does, and (with irony) any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category.

[...] It is against the official views of science as a field that you hold great variance.

[...] It is more difficult, perhaps, to see that science fears the unofficially directed intellect quite as much as it does the unofficially directed intuitions.

Even later, as he began writing science fiction, that writing fell under the then less envious label of science fantasy (underlined), which was not considered as pure in science-fiction circles. [...]

Science, of course, insists it searches for such knowledge, while at the same time narrowing its acceptable field of definitions so that it effectively blocks any information that does not agree with its own precepts. (Pause.) Both science and religion, generally speaking, provide certain services, which again generally speaking can be withheld to those who rebel against such authorities. [...]

[...] He did poorly in science in college, for that matter, for if his mind was too scientific for religious dogma, it was too creative and emotional for conventional scientific thought. [...]

(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. [...]

Art is as much a science, in the truest sense of the word, as biology is. Science as you think of it separates itself from the subject at hand. [...] In your terms, then, other civilizations considered art as a fine science, and used it in such a way that it painted a very clear-cut picture of the nature of reality — a picture in which human emotion and motivation played a grand role.

[...] Some other civilizations experimented with a different kind of science than the one with which you are familiar. [...] Your own behavior, customs, sciences, arts, and disciplines are in a way uniquely yours, yet they also provide glimpses into the ways in which various groupings of abilities can be used to probe into the “unknown” reality.

[...] If the same amount of time were spent to learn a different kind of science, you could indeed discover far more about the known and unknown realities. [...] The trouble is that many in the sciences do not comprehend that there is an inner reality. [...]

(9:53.) The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world.¹ Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness — one that is equally at home in either existence, well-grounded and secure in each. Almost anyone can become a satisfied and productive amateur in this art-science; but its true fulfillment takes years of training, a strong sense of purpose, and a dedication — as does any true vocation.

(Long pause.) Both religion and science see the self as primarily heir to flaws, decay. Only science’s Sinful Self operates in a framework in which there is no sacramental redemption. Science sees the world as rushing toward its own dissolution, and the self as the mechanistic system running down from the moment of its conception. [...]

Now: for all of its seeming sophistication, the self as generally seen by science is only science’s interpretation of the Sinful Self in mechanistic terms. [...]

[...] Science’s flawed self still carries the same import, however, the idea being that while science does not deal with values, so its says, it misleads itself considerably in making such statements, for it projects the worst kind of values both upon mankind and the rest of nature—so even if you are not tainted from religion’s old beliefs, it is difficult to escape such ideas. [...]

[...] Love is therefore surrounded very carefully by all kinds of barriers by both science and religion, and in your own lives you could now be much more demonstrative in those regards. [...]

So-called objective science gives you a picture, a model, that has served well enough in its own fashion, enabling you to travel to the moon, for example, and to advance in a technology that for a time you set your hearts upon. In the framework of objective science as it now exists, however, even the technology will come up against a stone wall. Even as a means, objective science is only helpful for a while, because it will constantly run up against deeper inner realities that are necessarily shunted aside and ignored simply because of its method and attitude.² No objective science or splendid technology alone will keep even one man or woman alive, for example, if that individual has decided to leave the flesh, or finds no joy in daily life.

Give us a moment … The particular thrust and direction of your own science have been directly opposed to the development of such inner sciences, however, so that to some extent each step in the one direction has thus far taken you further from the other. Yet all sciences are based on the desire for knowledge, and so there are intersections that occur even in the most diverse of paths; and you are at such an intersection.

[...] Otherwise, with your ideas of applied science and technology, the gadgets will be the pivoting point, and the ideas of manipulation will be stressed. In other words, unless the ideas behind objective science are altered, then gadget-produced altered states will almost certainly be used to manipulate, rather than free, consciousness.

[...] The inner order of existence and true science go together. [...]

Religion and science both loudly proclaim their search for truth, although they are seemingly involved in completely opposing systems. [...] The scientists have their own vocabulary, which is used to reinforce the exclusive nature of science. Now I am speaking of the body of science in general terms here, for there is in a way a body of science that exists as a result of each individual scientist’s participation. [...]

Granting that, however, cults interact, and so there is quite a relationship between the state of religion, when it operates as a cult, and the state of science when it operates as a cult. Right now your cultish religions exist in response to the cultish behavior of science. Science insists it does not deal with values, but leaves those to philosophers. [...]

Now those beliefs separate man from his own nature.¹ He cannot trust himself — for who can rely upon the accidental bubblings of hormones and chemicals that somehow form a stew called consciousness (louder and quite ironic) — an unsavory brew at best, so the field of science will forever escape opening up into any great vision of the meaning of life. [...]

There seems to be a division between science and religion, for even organized religion has an intuitive basis. [...] Science has followed the male orientation and become its epitome. Up until the present, science has consistently tried to do without the so-called feminine qualities. [...]

To an extent, some people in the sciences manage to blend the so-called female and male characteristics. [...]

Einstein was such a person in the sciences. [...]

(10:47.) Because of the world situation, and the overall male orientation of science, the results of his work were largely put to the uses of manipulation and control.

[...] All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man’s suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: You simply give the machine some better parts and all will be well (amused). Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly work miracles: The new heart will give a man new heart, for example.

[...] Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

[...] Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. [...]

And while science provided newer and newer comforts and conveniences, few questions were asked. [...] By this time it was apparent that the discoveries of science could also have a darker side. Life’s exterior conveniences would hardly matter if science’s knowledge was used to undermine the very foundations of life itself.

[...] So those who felt that religion had failed them looked anew to science, which promised — promised to — provide the closest approximation to heaven on earth: mass production of goods, two cars in every garage, potions for every ailment, solutions for every problem. And it seemed in the beginning that science delivered, for the world was changed from candlelight to electric light to neon in the flicker of an eye, and a man could travel in hours distances that to his father or grandfather took days on end.

[...] In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: the exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and the joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. [...]

[...] They have become caught between science and religion. [...]

When science seems to betray you, in your society, it does so because its methods are unworthy of its intent — so unworthy and so out of line with science’s prime purpose that the methods themselves almost amount to an insidious antiscientific attitude that goes all unrecognized. [...]

[...] Any unfortunate situations in the fields of medicine, science, or religion result not from any determined effort to sabotage the “idea,” but instead happen because men often believe that any means is justified in the pursuit of the ideal.

(Pause, then all intently:) Religion and science alike denied other species any real consciousness. [...]

(Pause.) This is carried through in economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and even the religions. [...]

[...] So in a fashion we are dealing with what science has thrown away. The picture we will end up presenting, then, will certainly not fit that of established science.

However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority for facts, then as you know science cannot prove its version of the [universe’s] origin either. [...] Moreover, science’s thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart—and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident.⁵ The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices (all with much emphasis and fast delivery.

“Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness. But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily end up creating its own illusion. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Science is used to asking quite specific questions, and as Ruburt wrote recently (in God of Jane) it usually comes up with very specific answers—even if those answers are wrong (with some humor).

[...] Man’s experience (underlined) includes, for example, all kinds of behavior for which science has no answers. [...] Science cannot be blamed for saying that its methods are not conducive to the study of this or that area of experience—but science should at least be rapped on the knuckles smartly if it automatically rejects such behavior as valid, legitimate or real, or when it attempts to place such events outside of the realm of actuality. Science can justly be reprimanded when it tries to pretend that man’s experience (underlined) is limited to those events that science can explain.

[...] However there are indeed many kinds of science. There are many sciences just dealing with locomotion. [...] I am making this point because I want it made plain—this, dear Joseph, is a pun—that when I speak of science on another plane I may not speak of the plain old science that you know.

[...] When however sciences progress on various planes, then visitations become less accidental and more planned. [...] Certain kinds of sciences cannot operate without it. When the inhabitants of a plane have learned mental science patterns, then they are to a great degree freed from the more regular camouflage patterns. This applies to a higher plane than mine, generally speaking, although my plane is further along in this science than your own.

The flying saucer appearances come from a plane that is much more advanced in technological sciences than earth at this time. However this is still not a mental science plane. [...]

[...] As science advances on various planes the inhabitants of the various planes learn to travel between planes occasionally, while carrying with them the manifestations of their home station.

[...] Established science is quite certain that no energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed (as stated in the first law of thermodynamics). Science sees energy and matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under varying circumstances.

[...] Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe, they search for it in the past. [...]

(9:31.) In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with the idea of an objectively created universe. [...]

[...] In their many forms religion and science haven’t provided satisfactory answers, nor have agnosticism or atheism. [...]

Science delegates the world of nature as the realm of exterior natural events. [...] The natural self, however, like the rest of nature, possesses a rich dimension of inside psychological depth, that science, because of its own definitions, cannot perceive. Telepathy and clairvoyance, for example, are a part of natural effects, but they belong to a nature so much more expansive than science’s definitions that they have been made to appear as highly unnatural eccentricities of behavior, rather than as natural components of consciousness.

SCIENCE AND SCIENCE’S PICTURE.

[...]

[...] Obviously that is known to science.

[...] Science perceived the spectacular complexity of exterior reality, but turned its sights completely away from any recognition — any at all — until it regarded subjectivity itself as a mere throw-away product, accidentally formed by a mindless matter.

(As far as I can discover, science pays very little attention to any philosophical questions about why we’re here, even while most definitely telling us what’s true or not true. And while postulating that life is basically meaningless or goal-less [DNA doesn’t care what its host looks like, for instance], science fights awfully hard to convince everyone that it’s right — thus attaching the most rigid kind of meaning or direction to its professional views! [If I were very cynical, I’d add here that to Jane and me it often seems that science wants only what science believes.] At the same time, in mathematical and biological detail much too complicated to go into here, the author of many a scientific work in favor of evolution has ended up by undermining, unwittingly, I’m sure, the very themes he so devoutly believes in. [...]

(For some years now, organized religion as a whole has been suffering from a loss of faith and members, stripped of its mysteries by science, which, with the best of intentions, offers in religion’s place a secular humanism — the belief that one doesn’t need blind faith in a god in order to be morally concerned for the common welfare; paradoxically, however, this concern is most of the time expressed in religious terms, or with religious feeling. Yet science too has experienced many failures in theory and technology, and knows a new humility; at least partly because of these failures, anti-intellectualism has grown noticeably in recent years.

I should add that the passages on science and scientists in Appendix 12 aren’t intended to add up to any general indictment of what are very powerful cultural forces, but to give insights into “where we’re at” at this time in linear history. [...] However, Jane and I feel that if science represents the “search for truth,” as it so often reminds us, then eventually it will contend with the kind of gifts she demonstrates. [...]

[...] Finally, the humor of the whole situation got through to me: As some have very clearly noted, in the biological and earth sciences especially, circular reasoning often predominates: The theory of evolution is used to prove the theory of evolution.

Science itself often displays compulsive and ritualistic behavior, to the point of programming its own paths of reasoning, so that they cover safe ground, and steadfastly ignore the great inner forces of spontaneity that make science — or any discipline — possible. [...]

Science itself, for all of its preciseness in some areas, often equates instinctive, impulsive —

Granted that our species’ best human understanding of “the mystery of life” and of the universe is exceedingly inadequate, still Jane and I do not think that nature is totally objective, indifferently cruel, or simply uncaring, as science would have us believe. [...] Science calls the idea holonomy, but Seth has been saying the same thing for years without ever mentioning the word. [...]

[...] Traditionally we’ve cast that feeling or knowledge in religious terms, for want of a better framework, but I think that more and more now the search is also on within science for a theory—even a hypothesis—that will lock up our often subjective variables into what might be called a more human equivalent of the still-sought-for unified theory in physics. [...]

But I note with some amusement that science absorbs such heresies by weaving them into and developing them out of current establishment thinking—concepts, say, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. [...]

[...] But once again irony enters in on my part, for I’m afraid our answer is that in general science isn’t even aware of the existence of the Seth material, notwithstanding the letters of approval and/or encouragement we receive from individual scientists, representing a variety of disciplines. [...]