“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When it enters at the point of birth, it is fairly independent, not yet identified with the form it has entered, and acting in a supportive role. If the personality entered at conception or sometime before birth, then it has to some extent identified with the body consciousness, with the fetus. It has already begun to direct perception — though perception has begun whether or not it is so directed — and it will experience the shock of birth in immediate, direct terms.

You do not have completely empty shells of matter about to be filled, in that the new personality hovers in and about, particularly after conception and with greater frequency and intensity thereafter. The shock of birth has several consequences, however, that usually draw the personality full blast, so to speak, into physical reality. Before this, the conditions are fairly uniform. The body consciousness is nurtured almost automatically, reacting strongly but under highly controlled conditions.

(10:10.) It greatly needs a stabilizing factor. Previously the body consciousness has been enriched and supported by deep biological and telepathic identification with the mother. The communication of the living cells is far more profound than you imagine. The identification is almost complete before birth as far as body consciousness alone is concerned.

(10:19.) There will be no distance between the personality and the experience of birth, then. The newly entered personality, as a consciousness, flickers, in that there is a while before stabilization takes place. When the child, particularly the young child, is sleeping, for example, the personality often simply vacates the body. Gradually the identification with the between-life situation dwindles until nearly full focus resides in the physical body.

You do not remember your birth, as a rule. Certainly it seems that you do not remember the birth of the world. You had a history, however, before your birth — even as it seems to you that the world had a history before you were born.

[...] I speak to you through the printed page, and yet my words will rearouse within you the voices that spoke to you in your childhood, and before your birth.

[...] That is the name given her at her birth. [...] (A one-minute pause.) Like you, she is presented with a life that seems to begin at her birth, and that is suspended from that point of emergence until the moment of death’s departure. [...]

[...] “Start a new book or give birth to a child?”

[...] The general framework, properties and characteristics of the body exist, therefore, before its formation. [...] It may seem to you that you do not have any conscious control over your body’s condition in life as you know it, much less before your birth. [...]

Within the basic framework of the body chosen before physical birth (for reasons that will be discussed later), the individual has full freedom to create a perfectly healthy functioning form. [...]

(Pause.) Before physical birth then you form a mental concept of the body you will have. [...]

(It isn’t necessary to go into dates and other details here; but several days before we were told that the Bach story’s originally scheduled appearance in late October had been postponed, Jane had a vivid dream giving her that literal information. [...]

[...] The period before an individual’s birth is enacted again symbolically, but in new ways, each year. The seeking toward birth is a spiritual stimuli that is then re-enacted, but in new creative ways: so that Ruburt in winter, particularly in late winter, is on the one hand working toward new births of energy and creativity; and on the other is aware of the very need for such new birth, that would be implied in a before-birth situation.

[...] The three of you communicated before your birth. The woman was your brother Loren as he appeared before. [...]

The pajamas merely represented symbolically your refusal to admit the fact of, first, nakedness; to hold off birth, to gaze about in the theatre of existence before permitting yourself to be born again on the physical plane, this deliberation always having been somewhat a portion of your makeup.

Your mother sat in the dream before a higher bar, symbolizing your own inner conviction, based on early rather puritanical bases, that your mother and her actions should be judged, and a child’s natural but unfortunate vindictiveness: “She who has hurt me, particularly if my mother and a female, shall meet justice.” You have her in the dream before the bar of justice.

[...] She has reported this dual reception on a few occasions before, and as before she said she was able to give voice to but one level at a time.

[...] If you were what the psychologists think you are and no more then would you be faced with an extinction predestined for you before your birth. [...]

It is true that for a moment when you close one conscious door, the door with which you are familiar, there is an instant perhaps before you open another shade and use another portion of your conscious mind to look into other realities...and you may momentarily feel disorientation. [...]

[...] Practically speaking, you must close one door before you can open another. [...]

[...] There are roads that you will follow and you will look back on the selves that you know now as the first bare glimmerings of your birth. [...]

[...] Most churches preach a dogma that stresses concepts of the sinful self, and sees man as a creature contaminated by original sin even before birth.

[...] In this dogma man needs to apologize for his birth, and the conditions of life are seen as a punishment set by God upon his erring creatures. [...]

(Pause.) Your brains are not empty, but well-oiled machines ready to whirl into activity at your births. [...] In those terms, now, the brain thinks before birth. [...]

[...] We’ve heard of the theory before, by the way — but transmitting cancer in such a fashion seems to be one of the most deadly results that can follow from the union of a man and a woman. [...]

I have mentioned before that many people have had cancer and recovered without knowing it. [...]

The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of life, leading toward a new birth and new experience. [...]

[...] Then it is no contradiction to say that entities existed before the birth of your planet, though in your time it seems that new ones are being brought to consciousness.

[...] Therefore there is no need, really, to think of a given group of entities before the birth of your planet. [...]

There is indeed no contradiction, though it may appear so, in the fact that all entities existed before your planet was formed, and the fact that fragments form new entities. [...]

[...] You cannot set a certain time to even a individual death, any more than you can set a time for any individual birth.

[...] My wife’s life and work show that we can even create challenges and goals before birth, then in physical life plunge into fulfilling those qualities as we don flesh and clothing and beliefs. [...]

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” [...]

[...] These help form and direct consciousness as it exists in any given individual from before birth.

Infants think long before they can speak. Thought must come before language. [...]

[...] Children learn such languages mentally long before they are physically capable of speaking them; but again, in genetically inspired dreams, children—or rather, infants—practice language. Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the fetus genetic dreams involve the coding and interpretation of language. [...]

[...] Such dreams provide (pause) the subjective understanding from which thoughts are developed, and in those terms complete thoughts are possible before the brain itself is fully formed. [...]

[...] His consciousness would not seem to flow into his body before birth, and out of it after death. [...]

[...] At birth, and before structured learning processes begin, you are far freer in that regard.

[...] A couple of months before these sessions began in late November of that year, she wrote an outline and five chapters for a novel about the development of communications between mankind and cetaceans, and called it To Hear A Dolphin. [...] Jane had time to show her manuscript to one publisher — who rejected it — before the Seth material got under way. [...]

You could (underlined twice) walk into “yesterday” as well as tomorrow at that point of birth — if you could walk — and indeed your perception brings you events both in and out of time sequence. [...]

“I was going back to bed when my last lines suddenly reminded me that I still feel the way I did when I was a young girl; that some part of the dawn does come for me; personally; and that to some extent time didn’t exist before I was born. My birth brought a certain element into the world that wasn’t there before. [...]

[...] More likely than not, they’d be chosen by the personality before birth, or outside the physical state.

[...] As events worked out, Seth was halfway through Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality before I realized that these supplementary notes would work well as the first appendix in the first volume. [...]

Even in his poetry, before our work, Ruburt’s energy led him way beyond “himself” at certain times. [...]

[...] Were either of our own physical lives saved—perhaps even before birth—by those using knowledge gained from animal experimentation? [...]

Before the session she said that she felt material from Seth “around,” concerning genetics.)

[...] I have said before that in one way or another each living cell is united with each other living cell through a system of inner communication. [...]

The reasoning mind, as you have used it thus far, roughly (underlined) since the birth of Christianity, has used—instead of used, confined—has confined its reasoning abilities to a very narrow spectrum of reality. [...]

You are subjectively “alive” before your birth. [...]

[...] The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. [...]

[...] Baal worship appeared in Syria and Israel many centuries before the birth of Christ — as early as 1400 B.C., according to Syrian cuneiform texts. [...]

[...] (To Ron): In a life in the east before the time of Christ, 1200 B.C., you were a member of a body of men who belonged to an esoteric heritage. [...]

[...] Before that, these codes were given by a race from another star. [...]

The infant sees mental images before birth, before the eyes are open. [...] Your self is secure in its own identity, unique in its characteristics, meeting life and the seasons in a way that has never happened before, and will never happen again — yet still you are a unique version of your greater self. [...]

[...] In a way it seems that you add on to yourself through experience, becoming “more than you were before.” [...]

[...] Now Seth came through with some material in answer to Jane’s question, before calling for a break at 9:38. [...]

[...] Initially, however, before the birth of images and words — as you understand them (underlined) — the world existed in different terms from those you know. [...]

(Long pause.) In ways most difficult to explain, man “absorbed” an animal’s spirit before he killed it, so that the spirit of the animal merged with his own. [...]

[...] Man, for example, exhibited natural psychic activity long before the birth of science —and for that matter before the initiation of formal religion. [...]

[...] In a fashion the material returns him, however, to a natural yet mystical inner knowledge of his childhood before (underlined) he cloaked it in the church’s robes, and it would be good for him to remember that and perhaps try to recapture some of those very early feelings that he has consciously forgotten. [...]

[...] The early vivid feeling for reincarnation, when he knew Roberts was not his proper name (as a youngster); the episode when he watched grade school children as no more than a toddler himself, and knew he had gone to school before; the flying out-of-body dreams; and the sense of identification with nature, and particularly with the night—those feelings waited for their vindication, for they did not fit into the world as he was told then. [...]

Jane, then, wrote those two poems 16 days before she dictated the last session for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche on April 4, 1977; one month before she began dictating Mass Events on April 18, 1977; two years and two months before she began God of Jane on May 6, 1979; two years and six months before she began dictating the Preface for Dreams on September 25, 1979; two years and eight months before she came up with the idea for If We Live Again on November 15, 1979; three years and five months before she began dictating Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality in Dreams on August 6, 1980; four years before she began dictating Seth’s sinful-self material in that book on March 11, 1981; four years and three months before she began coming through with her own sinful-self information on June 17, 1981; and four years and five months before, on August 26, 1981, she wrote the poem in Note 6 for Session 936 of Dreams: “Something in me / ebbs and tides, / as if I let myself / for a while / be washed away / out to sea / while leaving / some spidery shell / upon the shore /….”

[...] Those inner fields of reference in which you have your existence are completely changing themselves as your experience is added to them, and your own (long pause) identity was couched in those references before birth as you understand it.

Someone magically / took my leash off / and I was so scared /
I pretended it was / still there even / tighter than before.

[...] /
So I’m making / imaginary ones / which snip /
the dream leash / into a thousand silver / pieces— /
that melt before my / dream-real eyes.