“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mankind’s consciousness, however, experimented along time-specific lines. As he developed along those lines, various biological and mental methods of selectivity and discrimination were utilized. When in historic terms mankind became aware of memory, and recalled his past as a past in your terms, it was possible for him to confuse past and present. Vivid memories, out of context but given immediate neurological validity, could compete with the brilliant focus necessary in his present.¹

Though the past is actually quite as immediate, alive, and creative as the present is, man made certain adjustments, on several layers, that would focus definite distinctions and set past and present experience apart. While your particular kind of consciousness was developing, it began to intensify selectivity, to concentrate specifically in a small area of activity while blocking out other data. This was necessary because the particular kind of physical manipulation of corporal existence required instant physical response to immediately present stimuli.

(9:55.) Such selectivity and specialization therefore represented a pertinent method, as consciousness familiarized itself with earthly experience. Hunters had to respond at once to the present situation. In time terms, the “present” animal had to be killed for food — not the “past” animal. That animal — the past one — existed as surely as the one presently perceived, yet in man’s context, physical action had to be directed to a highly specific area, for physical survival depended upon it.

These became more and more biologically prominent, so that man’s consciousness rode them, or leaped upon them. These particular pulses or messages became the biologically and mentally accepted ones. They were clued into sense perception, then. These pulses or messages became the only official data that, translated into sense perception, formed physical reality. This selectivity gave an understandable line of reference from interior to exterior existence.

(10:36.) Propensity is a selection of significance, an inclination toward the formation of selected experience. [...]

These basic units move toward organizations then of a selective nature. Having an unpredictable field to draw from, they select activity according to those significances. [...]

[...] What you think of as daily life is then a focus upon certain probable events above others, a choosing of significances, a selection of pattern. Other portions of the self follow different selections.

[...] Now, because of the selectivity mentioned earlier,¹ certain directions may be easier than others, and some may appear impossible. [...]

The conscious mind as you normally think of it directs your overall action, and its ideas determine the kind of selectivity you use. [...]

1. Seth discusses selectivity in the 682nd session at 10:36.

[...] On one level the body’s very survival is largely determined by the units’ propensities for selectivity and significance. [...]

[...] However, the particular selectivity of your kind of consciousness rides over lapses that you do not recognize. [...]

[...] The “holes (spelled) of nonexistence” are plugged up by the process of selectivity. [...]

[...] Other facets of consciousness available to him, and a part of his greater nature, appear foreign, or “not-self,” or “beyond self,” because of the focus of selectivity as it now operates.

[...] (As I type I add: We forget anything not pertinent to our selected series of probable actions. [...]

“Now, physically, neurological action is a code for other actions that usually can’t be experienced at once because of the selectivity mentioned earlier.²

[...] He was moving into other selectivities. [...]

[...] Our young woman selectively interpreted her experience with the interpretation of names, for example, as given this evening—but that selectivity led her exactly where she wanted to go, and in certain terms she actually did ignore any data that did not lead her in a desired direction. So, while it may seem impractical, you do the same thing when you selectively pay attention to Ruburt’s improvements and selectively ignore areas of difficulty. [...]

The living people, so involved in this network, will have their own other encounters, of course, but again through a psychological selectivity. [...]

He would wonder what collective madness made or permitted man to select, from a virtual infinity of what would appear as chaos, to select a handful, a mere handful, of similarities and call it a universe.

[...] If a dream object or event does so straddle what you call not only time but space, and if as I say dream objects and creations maintain some independence from the dreamer, then you must see that although the dreamer creates his dreams for his own purposes, selecting only those symbols which have meaning to him, he nevertheless projects them outward in a value fulfillment and psychic expansion.

[...] The dream means something to the individual who originates it, selects its elements most carefully, but in order for him to use it he must create it.

[...] It is because of this highly selective quality that you can “tune into” the particular range of activity that is physical.

In their own way, animals also possess this selective consciousness. [...]

Now the animals’ conscious minds, connected with their physical brains, make this necessary selectivity possible. [...]

[...] A selection, or something offered from which selections may be made. [...]

(“A selection, or something offered from which selections may be made.” [...]

[...] (Pause.) The particular kind of significance settled upon would act both as a directive for experience and as a method of erecting effective boundaries, within which the selected kind of behavior would continue. The units can and do intermix, yet because of the propensity for selectivity and significance, whole groups of them will “repel” other whole groups, thus providing a protective inner system of interaction.

[...] Selections are made as to the areas of concentration. [...]

Your idea of one soul, one self, forms a significance and a selectivity that blinds you to these other realities that are as much “here and now” as your present self. [...]

[...] You choose one particular group of these, and latch upon this group of events as the only ones possible, not realizing that you have selected from an infinite variety of past events.

[...] In this probable evening (humorously) I select that probable alternative. [...]

I am not here specifically blaming Christianity, for far before its emergence, your ideas (underlined) and beliefs about good and evil [were] far more important in all matters regarding the species than any simple questions of genetic variances, natural selection, or environmental influence. In man’s case, at least, the selection of who should live or die was often anything but natural. [...]

[...] The actual work involved in the selection of data is still made according to the beliefs in the artist’s conscious mind as to who he is, how good an artist he is, what kind of artist he is, what “school” of artistic beliefs he subscribes to, his ideas of society and his place in it, and esthetic and economic values, to name but a few.

[...] The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized. [...]

[...] I selected them at random this morning, but picked just those I wanted, for their import is that Jane has no disease, as Seth has insisted all along. [...]

(Selections from The Wonderworks:)

It is of course necessary at this stage of your development that selectivity be used, and that some standards be drawn that will effectively define apparent limitations and boundaries. [...]

All events are known in advance, but still there is a selectivity that is unknown. [...]

[...] In the 686th session he referred to “official data” when he considered ancient man’s selection of certain mental and biological pulses as physical reality; later in the same session, he used the self-explanatory “official history.” [...]

[...] The meaning of the experience is stated in the final part of the session, so there is no need to go into it here; suffice it to say that the experience had a meaning, was not random but highly selective, and would be listed in our classification as “experiencing a concept.” [...]

But granted or not, the idea of any sort of genetic preparation for future contingencies collides with the very powerful theory of evolution, which holds that evolutionary, genetic changes take place only through natural selection and chance mutations (although random or chance mutations are generally regarded as mistakes on nature’s part). [...] It still has value, and recently has been employed in some remarkable scholarly studies that show how, in scientific terms, evolution can take place through means other than natural selection and chance mutations.)

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! [...] Instead, he assigned the pain and suffering in the world to the impersonal workings of natural selection and chance variation [or genetic mutation]. [...]

(I think it more than a coincidence that in these excerpts from Seth Speaks, Seth mentions Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Biblical story of creation in the same sentence, for those systems of belief represent the two poles of the controversy over origins in our modern Western societies: the strictly Darwinistic, mechanistic view of evolution, in which the weakest of any species are ruthlessly eliminated through natural, predatory selection, and the views of the creationists, who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures just as described in the Bible.

[...] Instead, I think that what has been learned so far offers only possible variations within the idea of evolution, for the talk is still about the origin of life out of nonlife, followed by the climb up the scale of living complexity; most evolutionists think that natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, still applies.

[...] In his book Darwin presented his ideas of natural selection — that all species evolve from earlier versions by inheriting slight (genetic) variations through the generations. [...]