“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane said there was much more to the idea of natural therapy in animals. She began tuning in to this information on her own, rather than getting it through one of Seth’s channels. Ages ago, humans not only watched the animals, but went to them for help. It had to do with shock treatment, she said wonderingly. If a human was in a catatonic state after a battle, for instance, the “animal medicine man” would purposely shock the patient into an emotional reaction to bring him out of the state.

Health and illness are both evidences of the body’s attempt to maintain stability. There is a difference in the overall health patterns in men and animals because of the quite diverse nature of their physical experience. More will be said about this particular subject later. Overall, however, in the animals illness and disease play a life-giving role, keeping balance both within a species and between them, therefore insuring the future existence of all involved.

In their own ways, the animals are quite aware of this fact. Some of them even bring themselves to their own destruction through what you would call suicide, and en masse. At that level the animals understand, and are always in touch with deep biological connections in which they know their own continuances within the chain of nature.

Animals, then, understand the beneficial directing elements of disease. They also comprehend the nature of stress as a necessary stimulant to physical activity. Observing even a pet, you will notice its marvelous complete relaxation, and yet its immediate total response to stimulus. So animals in captivity will fight to provide themselves with necessary health-giving stress factors.

Mitzi, running up and down the stairs (as she was doing even now, chasing her wadded-up paper ball), is an example of the love of excitement and activity with which both man and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, loved. [...] Think of your body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal. Think of the human animal, only let the word “animal” carry all of those beneficial colorations that you hold when you think of other species. [...]

[...] Animals and your own body consciousness have little concept of age. (Pause.) In a fashion almost impossible to describe, their consciousnesses—the body’s and the animals’—are “young” in each moment of their existences. I must perhaps here clear up a point: I am taking it for granted that you understand that I am referring to the “mental attitude” of animals and of the body consciousness, for they both do possess their own mental attitudes—psychological colorations—and above all, emotional states. [...]

You can learn much about your own body consciousness, and therefore to some extent about the natural man, by observing the behavior of your pets or other animals, and you can to some extent learn from their behavior, and therefore to some extent counteract any susceptibility to negative beliefs. [...] Such imaginings frighten the body consciousness, as you might frighten an animal. [...]

[...] It knows that it is related to those events, but it is also impeccably realistic in animal terms. If the skirmish is not at the front door or in the neighborhood, the animal consciousness simply watches all with a wary or amused mental attitude. [...]

[...] Men did not begin hunting animals until certain groups of animals needed a way to control their own population. As I have said before, men and animals learned from each other. [...]

The environment, man, and the animals were all characterized as ferocious, hostile to each other, each one determined to attain survival at the expense of the other. Man could not have existed under the conditions fostered in the moving picture — nor for that matter could any of the animals. [...]

Men also domesticated animals almost from the very first, so that men and animals both did each other a service — they worked together. [...]

— and the animals existed in the forms by which you know them today. No animal — or virus — is truly extinct. [...]

[...] Danger in that context exists under certain conditions clearly known to the animals, clearly defined: The prey is known, for example, as is the hunter. But even the natural prey of another animal does not fear the “hunter” when the hunter animal is full of belly, nor will the hunter then attack.

There are also emotional interactions among the animals that completely escape you, and biological mechanisms, so that animals felled as natural prey by other animals “understand” their part in nature. [...]

Dictation: An animal has a sense of its own biological integrity. [...]

In that environment there is a cooperative sociability of a biological nature, that is understood by the animals in their way, and taken for granted by the young of your own species. [...]

[...] The distinction between man-animal and animal-man was not as clear as it is in your time. [...] That early rapport, that early mixture, would later be remembered in myths of gods in animal form. [...] There were many toolmaking animal species, some predating man’s toolmaking facility. [...]

(Long pause.) Historically, it seems to you that mankind was born from an animal’s undifferentiated kind of consciousness into egotistical self-awareness. [...] The animals chose to develop their own kind of consciousness, as you chose your own. Animal awareness may seem undifferentiated to you. [...]

All animal gods hint of various experiments and species in which consciousness took different forms, in which the birth of egotistical awareness as you know it tried several areas of exploration. There were, for example, different versions of man-animal comprehension and activity.

[...] The totem pole, for example, is a remnant from an era where there was much greater communication between man and the animals — when, in fact, men went to the animals to learn, and from them first acquired knowledge of herbs and corrective medicinal behavior.³

(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. In using the animal’s flesh, then, the hunter believed that he was giving the animal a new focus of existence. He could draw on the animal’s strength, and the animal could join in human consciousness. [...]

[...] A child did not simply look at an animal, but let its consciousness merge with the animal’s, and so to some extent the animal looked out through the child’s eyes.

[...] When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.

[...] The last paragraph of material may give clues to human behavior today: Man kills animals — and eats them — for reasons he’s consciously forgotten. [...]

In the distant past some ancient civilizations did indeed use animals in such a fashion, but in a far different framework. The doctors or priests humbly stated their problems verbally and through ritualistic dancing, and then requested the help of the animal — so that the animals were not sacrificed, in those terms, nor taken advantage of. Instead, they united in a cooperative venture, in which animals and man both understood that no consciousness truly died but only changed its form.

The idea of using animals for experimentation has far more drawbacks than advantages; there is the matter of one kind of consciousness definitely taking advantage of another kind, and thus going counter to nature’s cooperative predisposition.

Animals have indeed often been quite helpful to man in various healing situations and encounters, but in all such cases these were cooperative ventures.

(4:36.) This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. [...]

[...] When an animal is playing dead it knows when the immediate danger is over. [...] Then he stops, sensing the environment like an animal sensing the air. Your part in the suggestions aids in a kind of creature understanding, as one animal might nuzzle another.

[...] Under some conditions animals in perfect condition will play dead, or otherwise immobilize themselves. [...] When those specific conditions vanish, the animal arises and goes about its way.

[...] While the animal may encounter danger, it does not feel that its world is not safe. [...] Imagined fears, projected into the future, put the body in a state of stress unknown to the animal. [...]

Spontaneous biological motion is an animal’s best insurance of survival, except under those conditions where the animal spontaneously plays dead.

He simply adds some of his energy to that present in the animal, mixing this vitality with the animal’s own. This does not mean that all animals are fragments in this manner, however. Animals, as any pet owner knows, have their own personalities and characteristics, and individual ways of perceiving the reality available to them. [...]

Animals have varying degrees of self-consciousness, as indeed people do. [...] There is nothing to prevent a personality from investing a portion of his own energy into an animal form. [...] It does not mean that a man can be reincarnated in an animal. [...]

[...] So he may project a fragment of his consciousness in such a way into an animal form. [...] A man is not an animal, then, nor does he invade, say, the body of one.

(“Number twenty-six: Are animals fragments of human beings?”)

You have forgotten, conveniently, how much you learned from all of the animals, as I have mentioned in past sessions. You learned a good deal of medicine from watching animal behavior: You learned what plants to avoid, and which to cultivate. [...] You learned social behavior by watching the animals. At one time you could identify with animals, and they with you to a remarkable degree. [...] Obviously, you could not have gone your way [as a species] had it not been for the animals.

[...] There are thousands of farm-bred animals, however [and have been], all throughout civilization, alive for a time, well-cared-for for a time—animals who in usual terms would not exist except for man’s “gluttonous” appetite for meat. [...] It seldom occurs to anyone that certain forms of animal consciousness came in physical form [by choice], that certain species are prized by man and protected, or that the consciousnesses of such animals had anything at all to do with such an [overall] arrangement.

[...] Of course animals can communicate with man, and of course man can communicate with other species—with all species. [...] Man cannot afford to become aware of such communication at this point, simply because your entire culture is based upon the idea of the animals’ “natural” subordinate position. The men who slaughter animals cannot afford to treat those animals as possessors of living consciousnesses.

Basically [many farmers love] animals for themselves, and delight in their ways—but by itself “delighting in animals” is not considered particularly virile enough. In your society, if you like animals you must not like them for themselves, but for other reasons. If you want to be with animals then you must become a farmer, or a veterinarian, or a cattleman, or whatever….

[...] You knew what was going to happen when you let the animal out at that corner. The animal felt no pain. [...] You aided in the development of its consciousness and it helped you by renewing your love; but as the animal changed its form so also now this reawakened love must look outward. [...]

[...] Now, in so doing, you also gave affection to the animal and awakened within it characteristics it did not have earlier. [...] Now though it seems to you perhaps at this point tragic, the facts are that the real tragedy would have occurred had the cat lived, in your terms, and had you curled up in it, in your house on the corner, and turned your love inward to the animal rather than outward, for there are people who need it. [...]

[...] You also help the members of this class without knowing, but your love for the animal was becoming ingrown. Now, the animal went on as a youngster leaves the house and grows up. [...]

[...] At the same time you extended the consciousness of the animal, it became more than it was. [...]

Other animals are kept out. [...] All areas of animal behavior alter to fit the circumstances as much as possible, and this includes sexual activity. To some extent the animals have been conditioned to the changing world. [...] When he studies such animal behavior, however, and sometimes uses the sexual patterns of the animals to make certain points about human sexuality, then man does not take this into consideration, but speaks as if the present observed animal behavior is the indication of a prime or basic nature inherent in their biology.

[...] However, when you examine animal behavior even in its most natural-seeming environment, for instance, you are not observing the basic behavior patterns of such creatures, because those relatively isolated areas exist in your world. Quite simply, you cannot have one or two or twenty officially-designated natural regions in which you observe animal activity, and expect to find anything more than the current adaptation of those creatures — an adaptation that is superimposed upon their “natural” reactions.

The balance of resources, animal travel patterns, migrations, weather conditions — all of these must be taken into consideration. Such isolated observation areas merely present you with a distorted picture of natural behavior, because the animals are also imprisoned within them. [...]

[...] Even in the animal kingdom, for example, males do not fight to the death over the females when they are in their natural state.

Both the men-animals and the animal-men were born with stronger instincts. They did not need long periods of protection as infants, but in an animal fashion were physically more agile at younger ages than, say, the human infant.

[...] Not from an animal ancestor in the way generally supposed. There were men-animals, but they were not your stock. [...]

There were animal-men. [...] Some were more like men, some more like animals.

[...] (Long pause.) Many of the man-animal groups had their own communities. They might seem limited to you, yet they combined animal and human characteristics beautifully, and they used tools quite well. [...]

Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masse is vastly lacking. [...] An unloved animal does not want to live.

[...] The experience of the animals is different, yet in their own ways animals have both individual intent and purpose. [...]

[...] Pet animals are inoculated against diseases, however. [...] This applies to human populations as well as to the animals.

There are also “trial runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.

“Your body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal,” he told us on January 23, for example. “Mitzi, running up and down the [cellar] stairs, is an example of the love of excitement and activity with which man and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved. [...] Think of your body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal…. Animals and your own body consciousnesses have little concept of age. In a fashion almost impossible to describe, [those] consciousnesses—of the body and the animals—are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences. I am taking it for granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes—psychological colorations—and above all, emotional ‘states.’”

4. Jane and I had always thought of transmigration (or metempsychosis) as meaning the birth of a human soul in just animal form. Actually, however, the term refers to the journey of the soul into any form, whether human, animal, or inanimate—thus differing from the ordinary doctrine of reincarnation, or rebirth into the same species. [...] Seth, in Session 705 for June 24, 1975, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality: “There is no transmigration of souls, in which the entire personality of a person ‘comes back’ as an animal. Yet in the physical framework there is a constant intermixing, so that the [molecular components of the] cells of a man or woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal, and of course vice versa.” In Note 2 for Session 840, in Mass Events, I’m quoting Seth from the 838th session for March 5, 1979: “I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of the souls of men to animals, say—a badly distorted version of something else entirely.”

[...] The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as you think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. [...] Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. [...]

[...] “That’s what I got before the session—about animals reincarnating—and I thought: Oh, no. [...] Neither of us could remember Seth stating flat out in any of his material that animals reincarnate, although he may have done so. [...]

[...] Animals, for example, while part of your experience, are also “tuned into” that grid at another level. [...]

[...] At one point Ruburt saw the ape still male, and then a portion of himself sitting at the library table, for in your position it is the animal instincts themselves that propel you to search for answers, to write books, to explore in your particular way. [...] Ruburt’s idea was still one of controlling those instincts and his “animal” abilities. [...]

[...] You are also quite correct, in that the ape also acted as an animal medicine man-woman (as in Personal Reality), symbolically acting out a part that once very well could have been performed in fact. [...] Their connections with animals are little understood. [...]

The ape on one level represented the animal instincts feared by Ruburt’s mother and grandfather as well, so Ruburt learned to look upon them askance. [...]

[...] In other terms the past was altered, in that Ruburt now experienced the yearned-for mother love that was warm in its animal female understanding, supportive and strong enough to easily bear a child’s small ragings and hatreds.

However, if given a choice, Jane and I now would forgo the “benefits” stemming from animal experimentation, even if our own future welfares were to suffer because of a subsequent lack of knowledge—and providing that at a time of crisis we didn’t weaken in our joint resolve! Following such a course would actually be most difficult, so pervasive in our society are the results flowing from animal research: I even think it might be necessary to live as a hermit in the wild to get away from them. Using animals in the laboratory is imposing human goals and values upon other life forms, even though the modern scientific method is supposed to be value-free. For such research is carried out in the name of progress and the practical common good, of course—and that progress applies also in the remedial treatment of other animals, let us remember. We think that every reader of this book has benefited, and still does, from animal experimentation, some of it most cruel, in ways that he or she can hardly suspect, let alone specify: even benefiting from the use of animals in the study of medical and chemical, beauty and recreational products that can be found in practically every home in the country. [...] I see the passive, thinking and unthinking tolerance of animal experimentation as a classical case of a society using ends to justify means—yet in the United States, at least, we carefully teach each generation of our species that such rationalizations aren’t morally acceptable….

1. Jane and I are both aware of and frustrated by the obvious ambiguities in our own feelings about the use of animals in medical research. [...] Were either of our own physical lives saved—perhaps even before birth—by those using knowledge gained from animal experimentation? [...] We do know that it’s much easier to condone a philosophy espousing traumatic and repetitive animal research if one is relatively shielded from it.

Then today we read how scientists at a company that markets animals for medical research have bred a strain of hairless laboratory mice without thymus glands. [...] [Indeed, these animals are so sensitive to disease of any kind that they must be raised under sterile conditions.] Jane was very upset by the article and mentioned it to me several times.¹

[...] So like any animal, they are thought of as dispensable, sacrificed to a fine humanitarian end.

[...] Her material, however, wasn’t influenced by the news story, for just about a year ago Seth-Jane delivered a session for Personal Reality on the mixing of animal and man: the 648th for March 14, 1973, in Chapter 12. I’d say that this evening Jane elaborated upon that session — especially upon the impressions she gave then during the 11:30 break, on “animal doctors … a bridge between animals and human beings.” [...]

[...] This automatically meant that emerging man, in that framework, must let go of a certain kind of animal comprehension that was extremely valuable overall, but could inhibit ego growth … For many centuries there was no clear-cut differentiation between various species of man and animal … There were also, of course, parallel developments in the emergence of physical man. [...]

(12:19.) “Some of the experiments with man-animals didn’t work out along our historic lines, but the ghost memories of those probabilities still linger in our biological structure, and in our terms can be activated according to circumstances.

It is shared by all of the other animals. Each animal knows that under certain conditions the other may fight or posture aggressively, or defend its nest. Each animal knows that in time of hunger it might be hunted by another. Except for those situations, however, the animals are not afraid of each other. They know that each other animal is of good intent.

To some extent, these are all unique and creative ponderings that on the part of the animals alone would be considered the most curious and enlightening intellectual achievements. The animals must relate to the earth, and so must man. As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man must pursue his ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

One animal chasing and killing its prey serves the greater purpose of preserving the balance of nature, whether or not the animal is aware of this — and again, the animal’s intent is not evil. [...]

He is indeed as blessed as the animals, however, and his failures are the results of his lack of understanding. He is directly faced with a far more complex conscious world than the other animals are, dealing particularly with symbols and ideas that are then projected outward into reality, where they are to be tested. [...]