“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But all things have consciousness, and in those terms possess a soul-nature. There are no gradations as to soul. Soul is the life within everything that is. Of course the fetus “has a soul” — but in the same way, if you think in those terms, then each cell within the fetus must be granted a soul (leaning forward with humorous emphasis, voice deeper). The course of a cell is not predetermined. Cells are usually very cooperative, particularly as they form the structures of the body.³

Dictation: Usually you think in terms of a hypothetical whole self or consciousness, emerging at birth and disappearing at death. There are, however, learned arguments in which professors debate such questions. Some astrologers use the time of conception in their calculations, while others prefer the date of birth. Various religions have decided that the “soul” enters the fetus at its conception, while others argue that consciousness cannot be considered a human soul until some time later, just prior to birth.

You grant soulhood only to your own species, as if souls had sizes that fit your own natures only. You preserve these ideas by thinking of animals as beneath you. Then, however, you must wonder when the soul enters the flesh, or when the alien fetus becomes one of your own, and therefore blessed by the gods and granted the right to life.

To a certain extent what you are was latent in the fetus, but there is no one point when “the full awareness of the soul enters into the flesh.” The process is gradual. In physical terms it begins before your own parents are born.

[...] Because your sense experience follows a time pattern that you can understand, then you take it for granted that a cell, for example, is the result of its past, and that its present condition arises from the past.⁴ The fetus grows into an adult, not because it is programmed from the past, but because it is to some extent precognitively aware of its probabilities, and from the “future” then imprints this information into the past structure.

It is almost impossible to begin with concepts of one isolated universe, one self at the mercy of its past, one time sequence, and end up with any acceptable theory of a multidimensional soul or godhead that is anything else but a glorified personified concept of what you think man is.⁶

[...] Some of his earlier information on the fetus can be found in sessions 503–4 in the Appendix of The Seth Material.

4. See Seth’s very acute discussions of the soul (or entity) in sessions 526–28 for Chapter 6 of Seth Speaks. He came through with many excellent points. I’ve always been intrigued by the remark he made just before 10:43 in the 526th session: “You are one manifestation of your own soul.” [...] A group of selves forms a soul. I am not telling you that you do not have a soul to call your own. You are a part of your soul. [...]

People have written here asking about soul mates.³ In certain circles this is the latest vogue. [...] They spend time searching for their soul mates — but the search involves them in a pilgrimage for a kind of impossible communication with another, in which all division is lost, with the two then trying to join in a cementing oneness, suffocating all sense of play or creativity. You are not one part, or one half, of another soul,⁴ searching through the annals of time for your partner, undone until you are completed by your soul mate.

3. Our dictionary defines a soul mate as one of the opposite sex with whom an individual “has a deeply personal relationship” — a mundane enough description. [...] Then we began to get letters from readers who either asked for Seth’s help in finding soul mates, or for his verification that such counterparts had, indeed, already been located.

That material bothered Jane, as I wrote at the end of the session, since “she wasn’t taken with the idea of a group soul, say, or of sharing a soul.” [...]

[...] In another, he presents some new material on the “original planetary system,” and in answer to a friend’s question, he begins an explanation of the perception of a fetus. [...]

The violence that you were both speaking of this evening opened up a chasm within each participator’s soul, through which he glimpsed the dizzying origins that were behind his identity. [...]

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by keeping him from the sins of pride. [...]

[...] Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. [...]

(Pause at 11:55.) Suffering is not necessarily good for the soul at all, and left alone natural creatures do not seek it. [...]

[...] There is a give-and-take between all elements of nature, so that such individuals often choose mothers, for example, who perhaps wanted the experience of pregnancy but not of birth — where they choose the experience of the fetus but not necessarily [that] of the child. [...]

[...] However, many of my readers, or their offspring, will be involved in a new dimension of selfhood in which consciousness is fully explored and the potentials of the soul uncovered, at least to some extent.

[...] They are psychic yearnings toward the ideal civilization — patterns within the psyche, even as each fetus has within it the picture of its own most ideal fulfillment toward which it grows.

[...] It is the power that makes physical growth possible, the power that is behind the fetus. [...]

1. In the order of their publication the five previous Seth books are: Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul; The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book; Volumes 1 and 2 of the “Unknown” Reality: A Seth Book; and The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression. [...]

Beginning in June 1974, then, while writing notes and appendixes for Volume 1 of “Unknown”, and taking Seth’s dictation for Volume 2, I spent eight months producing the art work for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness and for her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time; I finished all of those drawings in January 1975. [...]

“I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the ‘creative self to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. [...] Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. [...]

We had a hard time believing him when Seth told us the very next evening, on April 23, that Jane’s sinful self thinks her physical symptoms are necessary “for the personality’s own good”; that that self has no conception that its policies have become self-defeating; that, following Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, it believes that suffering is good for the soul; that the idea of the flesh itself being graced is, to it, blasphemous.

“In medieval times, to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched both the soul and the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.

[...] I felt a distinct start of surprise when I came across this passage of Seth’s, for I’d completely forgotten it: “Jane, for example, entered the fetus when it was about three months old, and accepted this as a new life. [...]