“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Both animals and men must die. If a man was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey — at least, not in the deepest of terms. And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts,” or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.

[...] They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.

Despite all of your knowledge about the animals, it has not really been suspected that the natural hunter-animal kills most mercifully. The animals follow the rule of good intentions, in which unconsciously, in your terms, the good of one does serve the good of all.

[...] Indirectly, however, you know that the slaughterhouses are cruel—that animals are not killed quickly or cleanly, and to some extent the psychic disquiet of those animals is consumed with their meat. Animals killed quickly and cleanly make better food.

[...] The animals, however, are embarked upon a different avenue than you. [...]

On the other hand, because of your agricultural methods and so forth, many animals live, through breeding, who would not live otherwise—so those creatures are given life. [...]

[...] Clumps of them (Jane gestured; her delivery was quite emphatic and animated) will be drawn together, literally sealed, only to drop away and disperse once more. [...] The air, in other words, can be said to be formed by animations of these units.

Now: These units of which we spoke earlier are basically animations rising from consciousness. [...]

[...] They are emitted by the cells, for example, in plants, animals, rocks, and so forth. [...]

[...] Jane’s delivery was quite emphatic and animated throughout. [...]

Animals consume one another, and in that consumption also, and at their level, there is again the innate knowledge of a sacrament, and animals understand this among themselves. You, however, eat indiscriminately with no thought of the living animal that you consume. Now as you consume the animals so one day will your physical body return to the earth and help form other animals. [...]

[...] Both as a method of ending their lives, in a quiet manner, for they killed them easily when they were too old to run from jungle animals or from hunters or from warriors from other tribes. [...] The elders preferred it rather than to be banished and left the prey of animals or to die of starvation and slow death outside of the tribe. [...]

They lived upon the physical planet with its wind and rain and storms and violence and animal [sic] but they would not show violence, they could not commit a violent act. [...]

([Arnold]“Do the animals that we know have a creativity in their actions as we do?”)

The animal moves, say, through a forest. [...] Through his senses the animal gets messages from distant areas that he cannot directly perceive, and of which he is largely unaware. [...]

[...] You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. [...]

[...] Like natural guilt, the state of grace is unconscious in the animals. [...]

In some animals, for instance, the rising of such conscious memory is apparent, yet still highly limited, specialized. [...]

[...] The truth behind such relationships is inherent in all God-Man, God-Woman, Animal-Man, or Animal-Woman legends and mythology. There are connections, then, between man and the animals and the so-called gods (in small letters), that hint at psychological and natural realities.

Man is a part of that trans-species consciousness also, as are the plants and animals. [...]

[...] Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. [...]

In the dream state, animals, men, and plants merge their realities to some extent so that information belonging to one species is transferred to others in an inner communication and perception otherwise unknown in your world.

Animals also dramatize. [...] Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. [...]

They know, the animals, in a way that you cannot, that their private existences have a direct impact upon the nature of reality. [...]

(I told Jane that I think Seth’s material on the animals’ sense equivalents of human civilizations is the best of its kind I’ve ever heard — most evocative indeed. [...]

In animals natural aggression is used with the greatest biological integrity. [...] The various degrees, postures, and indications of natural animal aggressiveness are all steps in a series of communications in which the animal encounters are made clear.

The animal’s behavior pattern is more limited than your own, in a way freer and more automatically expressed, but narrower in that the events an animal encounters are not as extensive as your own. [...]

[...] You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister — or from reading my book. [...] Your humanness did not emerge by refusing your animal heritage, but upon an extension of what it is.

As a rule the animals have better sense. [...]

All of this also applies to the animals to varying degrees. Even in animal groups, individuals are not only concerned with personal survival, but with the survival of “family” members. Each individual in an animal group is aware of the others’ situations. [...]

[...] You cannot experience subjective behavior “from outside,” so this natural mobility of consciousness, which for example the animals have retained, is psychologically invisible to you.

[...] In a manner of speaking that is what you have done, though the body is more animate than the nest.

(9:01.) However, animals do reason. [...] Therefore, often animal reasoning is not apparent to you. Animals are curious. [...]

[...] As a species, you think of yourselves (pause) as the “pinnacle” end of an evolutionary scale, as if all other entities from the first cell onward somehow existed in a steady line of progression, culminating with animals, and finally with man the reasoning animal. [...]

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect. [...] Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man does (pause), but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended. [...]

ANIMALS AND REASONING.

[...]

In your terms man is an animal, rising out of himself, from himself evolving certain animal capacities to their utmost; not forming new physical specializations of body any longer (again in your terms), but creating from his needs, desires and blessed natural aggressiveness inner structures having to do with values, space and time. [...]

Animals have a sense of justice that you do not understand, and built-in to that innocent sense of integrity there is a biological compassion, understood at the deepest cellular levels.

[...] On biological levels both animals understand. [...]

[...] The birth of compassion then took the place of the animals’ innate knowledge; the biological compassion turned into emotional realization.

(Long pause.) Animals massage each other, and also use touch healing, and these activities represent the natural characteristics available in the “animal family,” as well as occurring naturally in the family of man. Animals playing are always exchanging healing transformations of energy from one to the other. [...]

[...] It would give you the chance to explore different aspects of nature, quite simply, some different species of plants or animals, but one in which water itself is the ever-pervading main element. [...]

[...] It is highly important then that you realize the vitality and natural right to such energy, as it is available not only to yourself but to the plant and animal kingdoms themselves. [...]

[...] Much slower now:) It is best, beginning, to deal with specifics, working with any given small area—actually somewhat in the same manner that an animal might lick the fur of another. [...]

“The particular atmosphere surrounding your personalities just prior to the animals’ deaths was destructive, short-circuited, and filled with inner panics. [...] The fact is that the animals caught your emotional contagion, and according to their lesser abilities translated it for themselves.

[...] I would like to make clear, of course, that animals certainly do have energy to maintain their own health, but this is strongly reinforced as a rule by the vitality of human beings to whom the animals are emotionally attached. [...]

Tonight’s session isn’t book dictation, but the large portions of it I’m presenting convey useful insights into our social behavior and social health—and as I show in Note 1, those states can include our interactions with animals.

[...] The same relationships, however, do not only exist between human bodies, of course, but between man and the animals and the plants in the environment, and is part of the unending biological communication that overall produces the vitality of physical experience.

In many cases your scientists seem to have the strange idea that you can understand a reality by destroying it; that you can perceive the life mechanism of an animal by killing it; or that you can examine a phenomenon best by separating yourself from it. So, often, you attempt to examine the nature of the brain in man by destroying the brains of animals, by separating portions of the animal brain from its components, isolating them, and tampering with the overall integrity of both the animal in question and of your own spiritual processes. [...]

There are ways of identifying with animals, with atoms and molecules. There are ways of learning from the animals. [...]

I admit that I am being sneaky here; but if you did not feel the need to kill animals to gain knowledge, then you would not have wars, either. [...]

If you did not feel any need to destroy reality (in your terms) in order to understand it, then you would not need to dissect animals, hoping to discover the reasons for human diseases. [...]

As hinted, there have been all kinds of species of animal-man, and man-animal, of which your sciences are not aware, and bones found thought to form, say, a man and an animal that were from the same creature. [...]

[...] The complex nature of other animal consciousness escapes you completely. And when you compare your technologies, learning, logical thought, cultures and arts with what you understand of animal experience, there seems no doubt that you are superior and “the Flower of Evolution” — that all other kinds of life are topped by your existence.

You are closed to the intricate, voluptuous, sensuous, social experience of the animals, or even of the plants — not being able to perceive that different kind of biological emotion and belonging, that rich, sensual identification with earth, and cut off from a biologically oriented culture that is everywhere part and parcel of both plant and animal life.

I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them. [...]

(10:41.) In another way, animals also possess an “unconscious” anticipation, but they do not have to come to terms with it on an aware basis as the new consciousness did. [...] The evil animal was the natural predator, for example. [...]

[...] The earthly characteristics often appear as he is depicted in animal form, for he was also of course connected with the intuitive terrestrial attributes from which the new human consciousness would spring.

Now: This new kind of consciousness brought with it the open mirror of memory in which past joy and pain could be recalled, and so the realization of mortal death became more immediate than it was with the animals.

[...] At the same time members of the species had to cope with the natural environment as did any other animal. [...]

Any animal would rather be running and physically vigorous than not. But when an animal’s improving, he goes along with the improvement. [...]

[...] It did not understand the inner communication of the animals, and certainly it did not admit any altruistic animal intent. [...]

[...] In strict Darwinian terms, man and animal alike had to be turned aggressively outward in the most competitive of physical ways. [...]

(10:05.) These ideas went a long way to justify later scientific experiments that involved giving pain to animals, for example: nature itself had no feeling. [...]

[...] If a hunter literally knows his relationship with an animal, he cannot kill it. On deeper levels both animal and man understand the connections. [...] Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.³ The earth venture is cooperative. [...]

(Pause.) Speaking now in those historic terms that you understand, let me say that there was no single-line development from animal to man, but parallel lines, in which for centuries animal-man and man-animal coexisted cooperatively. [...]

[...] They are present within the animals, and within a blade of grass.

[...] Yet such experiments represent a strong line of probability only in its “infancy,” in which man could sustain himself without draining the earth, live without killing animals, and literally form a new kind of physical structure connected to the earth, while not depleting its substance.

In other terms, to your way of thinking, diseases represent animal afflictions, and the monkey represented that connection. No doctor stood in the parking lot with a monkey on a leash, yet in other terms the event was literal, for your doctors feel that they must control the animal in you to heal, and that without their leash the animals would run wild. [...]

[...] Ruburt saw a real doctor and a real monkey because he wanted to bring home the point that living animals were then involved who were then diseased, and that real men conducted the experiments.

[...] In the exterior world certain animals “kill” others. You had for centuries, then, speaking in your limited terms, a situation in which men and animals were both hunters and prey. [...] Again, the slain animal knew that it would “later” look out through its slayer’s eyes⁸ — attaining a newer, different kind of consciousness. The man, the slayer, understood the great sense of harmony that existed even in the slaying, and knew that in turn the physical material of his body would be used by the earth to replenish the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

[...] There were animal-men and man-animals, using your terms, that shared both time and space for many centuries.⁶ This is, as you all well know, a physical system in time. [...]

[...] To some important extent the same applies to the animals. The cell might gladly “die,” but the specifically oriented man-and-animal consciousness would not so willingly let go.

Man’s consciousness, and to some extent that of the animals, is more specifically identified with form, however. [...]