“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Originally I planned this appendix on evolution to contain just three widely separated excerpts from Seth’s material: an early unpublished session, a few passages in Seth Speaks, and one in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. The appendix, however kept growing as I worked on it; I found myself adding quotations from other sessions, along with comments derived from my own reading and from conversations Jane and I had on the subject.

(I learned that “evolution” can mean many things.¹ Like variations on a theme, it can be progressive or relatively sudden, convergent or divergent. I also learned that once I began to study it, a great amount of material presented itself seemingly without effort on my part, the information ranged all the way from paleontological studies to current biological research on recombinant DNA, and I found it in newspapers, scientific journals and popular magazines, in books and even on television. [I’m sure others have had similar experiences: Once a subject is focused upon, data relative to it seem to leap out from the background welter of daily events and “facts” surrounding one’s life.] Almost automatically, many of the notes for this appendix came to deal with the scientific thinking about evolution, and I realized that I wanted them to show the differences [as well as any similarities that might emerge] between Seth’s concepts and those “official” views prevailing in our physical reality.

(Our beliefs and intents cause us to pick “from an unpredictable group of actions,” or probabilities, those that we want to happen, as Seth tells us in the 681st session in Volume 1; therefore, from my physically oriented probability the considerable work I’ve put into this paper is an examination of evolution in connection with a number of Seth’s concepts. Religious questions connected with evolution aren’t stressed as much as some might like, although they aren’t ignored either — but to go very far into religious history would lead away from the focus I’ve chosen.

(Even so, as I worked on this appendix I wondered again and again why I was investing so much time in it. The answers proved to be simple once I understood. Then I ended up shocked to discover how little real evidence there is to back up the idea of evolution, and fascinated by the limits of scientific thinking. I was quite surprised at my reactions. Somehow Jane and I always understood, to make an analogy, that Seth’s kind of “simultaneous” reincarnation [or anyone else’s kind, for that matter] wasn’t acceptable in our Western societies at this time in history; we could trace out many reasons why this is so. But some time passed before I realized that our ruling intellectual establishments were advancing notions about evolution that were not proven in scientific terms — then teaching these “facts” to succeeding generations. 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.

(The first quotes I’ve put together, then, are from the 44th session for April 15, 1964. In that session Seth gave us his interpretations of some of the basic laws or attributes of the inner universe, but it will be quickly seen that he was really discussing space and time,² as those qualities are perceived in his reality and in ours. In our world, of course, space and time form the environment in which conventional ideas of evolution exist. For that matter, all of the material in this appendix shows the interrelationship between our ideas of serial time and Seth’s simultaneous time. Connected here also is the philosophical concept known as “naïve realism,” which will be discussed briefly later.

These fundamental laws are followed on many levels in your own universe. So far I have given you but one, which is value fulfillment. In your physical universe this rule is followed as physical growth. The entity follows it through the cycle of [simultaneous] reincarnations. The species of mankind, and all other species in your universe on your particular horizontal plane, follow this law [value fulfillment] under the auspices of evolution (my emphasis).⁵ In other camouflage realities, this law is carried through in different manners, but it is never ignored.

(The “value climate of psychological reality” first mentioned in the [44th] session just quoted, is also dealt with through analogy in the 45th session. Portions of that material are given as Appendix 8 in Volume 1; in that session also Seth stated that “value expansion becomes reincarnation, and evolution and growth.” [Seth’s own kind of simultaneous time, of course, easily accommodates all three concepts, although this appendix isn’t concerned with reincarnation.]

(Seth material on evolution is presented twice in the 582nd session for Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks — not only in the session proper, but from an ESP class delivery given a few days later, on April 27, 1971. In class, Seth discussed Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution,⁷ and that material, some of which wasn’t published in the 582nd session is the source for my second group of excerpts:)

Now, if you had all been really paying attention to what I have been saying for some time about the simultaneous nature of time and existence, then you would have known that the theory of evolution is as beautiful a tale as the theory of Biblical creation. Both are quite handy, and both are methods of telling stories, and both might seem to agree within their own systems, and yet, in larger respects they cannot be realities….

Within you, concepts and actions are one. You recognize this, but your mental lives are often built around concepts that, until recently, have been considered very modern and very “in,” such as the idea of evolution … In actuality, life bursts apart in all directions as consciousness does. There is no one steady stream of progress.

(From the beginning, then, Seth has referred to evolution in his material. He attaches his own meanings to it, however, and as I show in this appendix, does not imply that all life as we know it on this planet evolved from a single primeval source. [See notes 5 and 7.]

(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.

(Many creationists believe that the Bible is literally true. [An undetermined number of scientists hold creationist views, by the way, but I have no statistics to offer on how many do.] The Bible certainly advocates at least a relative immutability of species, rather than a common ancestry in which a single cell evolved into a variety of ever more complex and divergent forms. In between these opposites there range all shades of meaning and interpretation on evolution. Theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists, for example, try to bring the two extremes closer together through postulating various methods by which God created the world and then, while remaining hidden, either helped it to evolve to its present state in the Darwinistic tradition, or, through a series of creative acts, brought forth each succeeding “higher” form of life.

(For the most part Seth’s ideas are far away from thoughts of replicating genes or the second law of thermodynamics. Through Jane, he grapples with the mysteries of existence in emotional terms, rather than through the impersonal, “scientific,” and really unproven concepts that life originated by accident [more than 3.4 billion years ago,⁸ to give a late estimate], and perpetuates itself through chance mutations. Darwin’s objective thinking, then, cut him off from such comprehensions as Seth advocates. The same was true for many scientists and theistic thinkers in succeeding generations, and in my opinion this holds today. I suggest that the entire 634th session in Personal Reality be read with this appendix, for in it Seth explored some connections between animal and man — including the evolution [my emphasis] by man of “certain animal capacities to their utmost.” At practically the same time, in the 637th session for the following chapter [9], he could tell us: “Note: I did not say that man emerged from the animals.”

(The third excerpt I’d originally planned to use is from the 690th session in Volume 1, and shows that even when Seth talks of evolution in our terms of ordinary time, he means something quite different from that conventional definition of linear change: Precognition is one of the attributes of the growth through value fulfillment that he described in the [already quoted] 44th session. I also want to use this material to lead into short discussions of “naïve realism,” and evolution at the level of molecular biology. Seth:)

I have said that evolution does not exist as you think of it, in any kind of one-line ape-to-man sequence. No other species developed in that manner, either. Instead there are parallel developments. Your time perception shows you but one slice of the whole cake, for instance.

In thinking in terms of consecutive time, however, evolution does not march from the past into the future. Instead, precognitively the species is aware of those changes it wants to make, and from the “future” it alters the “present” state of the chromosomes and genes (see Note 14) to bring about in the probable future the specific changes it desires. Both above and below your usual conscious focus, then, time is experienced in an entirely different fashion, and is constantly manipulated, as physically you manipulate matter.⁹

(Seth’s ideas aside for the moment, biologists faithful to Darwin’s theories don’t want to hear anything about the precognitive abilities of a species, nor do they see any evidence of it in their work. 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]. Not that scientifically the concept of a far more flexible time — even a backward flow of time — is all that new. In atomic physics, for example, no special meaning or place is given to any particular moment, and fundamentally the past and future all but merge in the interactions of elementary particles — thus at least approaching Seth’s simultaneous time.¹⁰ At that level there’s change, or value fulfillment, but no evolution. To Jane’s and my way of thinking, if there’s value fulfillment there’s consciousness, expressed through CU’s, or units of consciousness.

(But to some degree many scientists outside physics regard such esoteric particle relationships as being of theoretical interest mainly within that discipline; the concepts aren’t seen as posing any threat to biology, zoology, or geology, for instance, nor do they tinker with naïve realism. The biological sciences can cling to mechanistic theories of evolution by employing the conservative physics of cause and effect to support their conclusions while being aware, perhaps, of the tenets of particle physics. Such “causal analysis” then proves itself over and over again — a situation I wryly note, that’s akin to the criticism I’ve read wherein the theory of evolution is used to prove the theory of evolution. [I mentioned such circular reasoning near the beginning of this appendix.]

(I find it very interesting, then, to consider that the theory of evolution is a creature of our coarser world of “physical” construction. Our ordinary, chosen sensual perceptions move us forward, within “the time system that the species adopted,” as Seth commented in Chapter 8 of Personal Reality. And Seth’s explanation of the moment point¹¹ encompasses the seeming paradox through which consecutive time can be allowed expression within simultaneous time.

(Naïve realism, the philosophical concept that’s been mentioned a few times in this appendix, enters in here. It could, however, be considered at just about any time, since its proponents believe that it’s unconsciously involved in practically all of our daily activities. Simply put, naïve realism teaches that our visual and bodily senses reveal to us an external world as it really is — that we “see” actual physical objects, for instance. Disbelievers say that neurological evidence contradicts this theory; that from the neurological standpoint the events in our lives and within our bodies depend upon interpretation by the brain, that we can know nothing directly, but only experience transmitted through — and so “colored” by — the central nervous system. The perceptual time lag, caused by the limited speed of light, is also involved in objections to naïve realism. I merely want to remind the reader that in ordinary terms naïve realism, or some mind-brain idea very much like it, is habitually used whether we’re considering evolution within a time-oriented camouflage universe, painting a picture, or running a household. And after many centuries, the debate over the relationship between mind and brain continues, if first the existence of the mind is even agreed upon!

(Within that temporal framework investigators have recently discovered great biochemical differences among human beings at the molecular level: The genetic structures of numerous proteins [see Note 5] have been shown to be much more varied than was suspected. Even more pronounced are the differences among proteins between species. Each of us is seen to be truly unique — but at the same time those studying biological evolution express concern about whether their discoveries will challenge Darwinistic beliefs. 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.

(I continue my projections by writing that to a molecule of DNA the conventional notion of evolution — could such an entity grasp that idea, or even want to — might be hilarious indeed, given its own enhanced time scheme.¹⁷ Actually it would be more to the point if perhaps with the aid of hypnosis and/or visualization, we tried from our giant-sized viewpoints to touch such minute consciousnesses with our own,¹⁸ and so extend our knowledge in unexpected ways. Some probable realities might be reached — potential conscious achievements that I think are already within the reach of certain gifted individuals, Jane among them.¹⁹ Jane and I would rather say that the variability among humans [or the members of any other species] at the molecular level is a reflection of Seth’s statement that we each create our own reality, with all that that implies.

(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. The challenge is profound. The consciousnesses of numerous other species may be so different from ours that we only approximately grasp the meanings inherent in some of them, and miss the essences of others entirely. To give just two examples, at this time we are surely opaque to the seemingly endless search for value fulfillment that consciousness displays through the “lowly” lung fish and the “unattractive” cockroach. Yet those entities are quite immune to our notions of evolution, and they explore time contexts in ways far beyond our current human comprehension. As far as science knows, both have existed with very little change for over 300 million years.

(It should be clear, then, that in our camouflage reality the ordinary concept of evolution becomes very complex if one chooses to make it so. The process can be discussed from many viewpoints; Jane and I think that such inquiries could easily “evolve” [to make a pun] into a book, either to bolster Seth’s ideas on the subject, for instance, or to refute them. I now have on file materials that support or reject any stance on evolution that one cares to take. But it never fails, as “they” say: The members of each “pressure group,” whatever its orientation, want to see things their way — very human performances, I’m afraid. Once it’s created, each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals.

(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. I’ve hinted at some of those paradoxes in certain notes [mainly 5 through 8] for this appendix.

… in certain terms the theory of evolution, as it is conventionally held, has caused unfortunate beliefs. For how can you look at yourselves with self-respect, with dignity or with joy, if you believe that you are the end product of forces in which the fittest survive? Being the fittest implies those given most to what would appear to be murderous intent — for you must survive at the expense of your fellows, be you leaf, frog, plant, or animal.

You do not survive through cooperation, according to that theory, and nature is not given a kind or creative intent, but a murderous one. And if you see yourselves as the end result of such a species, then how can you expect goodness or merit or creativity from yourselves, or from others? How can you believe that you live in a safe universe when each species exists because it survives through claw, if it must hunt and kill out of murderous intent, as implied in the theories of evolution and of reality itself?

(I repeat that when Seth discusses evolution his meaning differs considerably from the scientific one — which, with various modifications, is even accepted by a number of religious thinkers. As I show at the end of this appendix, Seth allows for a much greater range of simultaneous origins; in our reality these imply growth and development out of that “basic” group of species for the most part, with multidimensional purposes operating inside an enhanced time scheme that includes probabilities, reincarnation, counterparts,²² precognition, and other concepts, meanings, and beliefs. All of these qualities are manifestations of All That Is, or consciousness, or energy, or whatever. Probabilities aside, when Seth talks about cells [or their components] recombining as parts of plant or animal forms, as he does in the 705th session, Jane and I don’t take that to mean the evolution, or alteration, of one species into another — but that a unity of consciousness pervades all elements in our environment, whether “alive” or “dead.” With the concept of probabilities in mind, however, much of the “thrust for development and change” that Seth also mentions as existing inside all organisms, could just as well take place in those other realities. Early in this appendix, I described how Seth continually built upon material that he’d given before, and that processes of correlation between old and new resulted. At this time, my ideas here represent a correlation between Seth’s material on evolution in the 705th session [which led to this appendix], and his later statements on origins, referred to above. We hope to learn much more about the whole business of evolution. And behind all, Seth insists upon the condition that each of us chose to experience this camouflage reality within this historical context.

(My thought is that because of that choosing, common denominators must lie beneath the clashing beliefs about evolution, and that a good place to start looking for such unifying factors is within the theory, or the framework or idea, of simultaneous time — however one wants to try to express such a quality within serial terms. The search would be a complicated one. At the same time, I admit that ideas like this always remind me of Seth’s comments in the class session for June 23, 1970, as excerpted in the Appendix for Seth Speaks:)

(However, collectively we do share an agreed-upon reality, even if one subject to many stresses. The next two excerpts to be presented from Seth came through in a couple of sessions delivered some time after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality. I’ve put them together for easy reading. Their inspiration was my work here and the discussions on evolution that Jane and I led in ESP class. As noted with the quotations given in Note 13, eventually this material will be published in its entirety as part of a Seth book; perhaps then it can be used as a guide for the sort of investigation just mentioned. In the meantime, the thoughts below can at least help orient some fresh thinking about the beginning of our planet, of all the species upon it, and indeed of the universe itself. Seth began:)

(Seth’s statement just given, that fully developed men coexisted with their supposed ancestors, led to our request that he follow through with more information on the subject. He’s done so to some extent, and here we’re presenting material from one of those later sessions to show his thinking. He continues to confound accepted evolutionary theory. As usual, however, Seth’s new data obviously imply new questions that we haven’t gone into yet. But at least, I told Jane, he’s said certain things that we can ask questions about, whether from the viewpoint of evolution, time, language, civilization, or whatever. The excerpts to follow, incidentally, are those I referred to earlier in this appendix, when I wrote that just as Jane had supplemented Seth’s material on early man with some of her own [as given in Appendix 6 in Volume 1], he in turn added to hers:)

(To us, even “ordinary” linear knowledge as it accumulates through the next century or two, not to mention over longer spans of time, is certain to severely modify or make obsolete many concepts about origins and evolution that today are dispensed by those in authority — and which most people accept unthinkingly.

(Now we read late surveys that show an increase in religious faith, and statements to the effect that science does not claim to reveal absolute truth, that any scientific theory is valid only until a variance is shown. Jane and I certainly aren’t turned on to realize that a major religion, for instance, teaches the “facts” of man’s basically corrupt and sinful nature; surely a religion in the best sense can offer beliefs superior to those! At the same time, we take note of the latest efforts of biological researchers to explain how, millions of years ago, a primitive DNA molecule could begin to manufacture the protein upon which life “rides,” and thus get around the contradiction posed in Note 8: What made the protein that sustains the processes of life, before that life was present to make the protein? The scientists involved hope the new hypothesis will survive further tests and become “fact,” thus giving clues to the riddles of origins and evolution. But to briefly paraphrase material Jane came through with not long ago [and which, again, will eventually be published]: “How does one deal with new facts that undermine old facts, in whatever field of endeavor? Do you say that reality has changed? Upon examination, facts give.”

(The search, then, is on for new unities and meanings; a convergence, one might say, of the realities of science, nature, religion — and, of course, mysticism. By mysticism I mean simply the intuitional penetration of our camouflage reality to achieve deeper understandings relative to our physical and mental environments — and such comprehensions are what Jane seeks to accomplish through her expression of the Seth material.²⁵ In that sense, it isn’t necessary here to discuss attaining “ultimate” knowledge — it will be enough to note that as one person Jane can use her abilities to help unify a number of viewpoints. She can also bring to consciousness the idea that no matter what our individual orientations may be, collectively we do have overall purposes in the world we’ve created. This realization alone can be a transforming one; as I show in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, it can be a most useful one in practical, everyday life as well. Within that sort of framework, the evolution referred to by Seth — in whatever way it may concern the development of ideas, planets, creatures, or anything else — makes sense.)

1. Over the years, my outside reading on evolution has covered many often conflicting viewpoints. Whether their beliefs are rooted in the tenets of conventional biology (Darwinism), for instance, or allied with those of the creationists (who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures, just as described in the Book of Genesis), the advocates of rival theories have impressed me as having at least one thing in common: No matter how violently they may disagree, their arguments lack all sense of humor. This is serious stuff, world! Whatever happened to the spontaneity and joy in life? For surely, I found myself thinking as I read all of those antagonistic ideas, spontaneity and joy were the very ingredients that Seth would place uppermost in any theory or scheme of life’s “beginnings,” regardless of its philosophical stance.

4. This paragraph and the preceding one were used as a footnote for the 637th session in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality. That session, held 18 months ago, contains material appropriate to this appendix: As an analogy, Seth compares the “evolution” of souls in terms of value fulfillment to cellular growth in our physical reality.

5. According to my interpretation of this sentence, Seth stops short of telling us that in our reality all species — man, animals, and plant life (and viruses and bacteria too, for that matter) — developed from a single primordial living source. Evolutionary theory maintains that such a source spontaneously came into being, riding upon various protein molecules (or certain other kinds of molecules) that had themselves chemically — and miraculously — evolved out of nonliving matter, then demonstrated the ability to duplicate themselves. (When Seth came through with this 44th session, neither Jane nor I had enough background information about theories of evolution to ask him to be more specific. Proteins, for instance, are very complex chains of amino acids, and consist of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and/or certain other elements. They exist in great variety in all animal and vegetable matter; in the body each protein supports a very definite function.) But the view that all life had a common origin, that by pure chance it originated on the earth — just once — without the aid of God, or any sort of designer, is today accepted by most scientists in biology and related disciplines. Such thinking stems from the work done in the 19th century by the English naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

However, Jane and I believe that at most the “facts of evolution” make up a working hypothesis — or unproven proposition — only, for many of evolution’s tenets, especially those involving energy/entropy (see Note 6), are open to serious challenge. There’s plenty of evidence around for changes occurring within species, but the “upward” transmutation of one species into another has not been scientifically proven from the index fossil record, nor has it been experimentally verified. The arguments about evolution can get very technical, so in my notes I’m referring to those aspects of the subject in the barest terms possible.

Any biologist who is a true Darwinist would find these statements of Seth’s to be anathema: “Psychic and religious ideas, then, despite many drawbacks … are far more important in terms of ‘evolution’ than is recognized.” And: “I am telling you that so-called evolution and religion are closely connected.” (From the 690th session, in Volume 1.) Such a scientist would have the same reaction to Seth’s statement that “Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way around.” (From the 513th session, in Chapter 2 of Seth Speaks.)

In connection with material in this note, I think it quite interesting and revealing that several millennia before Darwin, man himself began playing the role of a designer within the framework of nature, through his selective breeding of animals and his hybridization of plants. These activities certainly represent evolution through conscious intent, guided by the same creature who insists that no sort of consciousness could have been responsible for the origin or development of “life,” let alone the “dead” matter of his planet. Not only that: We read that even now in his laboratories man is trying hard to create some of that life itself. This is always done, of course, with the idea that the right combination of simple ingredients (water, methane, ammonia, et al.) in the test tube, stimulated by the right kind of energy under just the right conditions, will automatically produce life. It’s confidently predicted that eventually at least one such experiment will succeed. I have yet to see in those accounts anything about the role consciousness will play in this truly miraculous conversion of dead matter into that of the living. Perhaps those involved in the experiments fear that the idea of consciousness will impugn the scientific “purity” of their work.

13. A note added much later: Sometimes things develop in unexpected ways: One might say that several years later Seth continued the material just presented. By the time he did so he’d been through with “Unknown” Reality for quite a while, but I was still working on the notes and appendixes for Volume 2. As I wrote Appendix 12 in particular I discussed with Jane the passages on naïve realism; soon afterward Seth began to refer to the subject during scheduled sessions, and one of them contained the excellent information below. (Only one part of that session is quoted, but eventually it will be published in its entirety as part of a Seth book.) Very evocative, to consider how consciousness chooses to manifest itself physically, in direct contradiction to the mechanistic beliefs held so tightly — and with so little humor — by those adhering to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. From Session 803:)