“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is quite true, however, that in the wild many animals protect and provide for wounded or disabled members, and that the wisdom that comes with age is indeed appreciated even in the animal kingdom. [...]

Animals also possess independent volition, and while I am emphasizing animals here, the same applies to any creature, large or small: insect, bird, fish, or worm; to plant life; to cells, atoms, or electrons. [...]

[...] Yet animals have their own “morality,” their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. [...]

[...] You are surrounded everywhere by other kinds of consciousness whose validity you have largely ignored, whose psychic brotherhood you have dismissed—kinds of consciousness in the animal kingdom particularly, that deal with a different kind of knowing, but who share with you the reality of keen emotional experience, and who are innately aware of biological and psychic values, but in ways that have escaped your prejudiced examination.

To some extent that emotional reality is also expressed at other levels—as your own is—in periods of dreaming, in which animals, like men, participate in a vast cooperative venture that helps to form the psychological atmosphere in which your lives must first of all exist.

They all use tools of one kind or another, and live indeed in close concord with the animals. There is no competition between them and animals, for example, and they are not basically aggressive, though they could be extremely dangerous if they were cornered, or if their young were attacked.

They grow quite sluggish in wintertime, in very cold climates, and their temperature drops, as is characteristic of hibernating animals, except that their temperature is more sensitive to daily variations, so that on some winter days they can forage for food very well, while on the other hand they may hibernate for even weeks on end.

[...] The animals must produce. [...]

[...] In making such statements I am not personifying the cell, for the desire for communication and motion does not belong to man, or even animals, alone. [...]

(Pause at 11:01.) Give us a moment… It is fashionable to believe that the animals do not possess imagination, but this is a quite erroneous belief. [...]

In your terms, the imagination of the animals is limited. [...]

[...] The balance of nature upon your planet is no chance occurrence, but the result of constant, instant computations on the part of each most minute consciousness, whether it forms part of a rock, a person, an animal, a plant. [...] There is a biological understanding that exists, for example, when one animal kills another one for food. [...]

I want to be very careful here, for I am speaking of natural interplay among the animals. This is not anywhere meant to justify the cruel slaughtering of animals by man under many circumstances.

The same applies in your treatment of animals. Animals respond to your feeling, your intent. You do not assign beliefs to animals. [...] Animals in fact suffer greatly, for they often become so terrified of modern methods of medicine that an inoculation against one disease promptly brings about the occurrence of another.

(I’d forgotten Jane’s questions in the last session, about the inoculation of humans and animals.)

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

Animals and Trees in the Interior Universe
Excerpts from Sessions 17 and 18

[...] This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

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

[...] She had no trouble speaking, and when we met a friend she talked quite animatedly.

[...] Her manner was somewhat more animated than it has been lately, and her voice was deeper. [...]

[...] Her delivery had been rather quick and animated throughout the session, giving the impression that Seth was more than a little amused by the day’s events.)

(9:30.) In the beginning there were also species of various other kinds: combinations of man-animal and animal-man, and many other “crossbreed” species, some of fairly long duration in your terms. [...]

[...] The pattern of animal behavior, for example, is not at all as set and finished as you suppose. [...]

(“Are animals entities?”)

(“Are people reborn as animals?”)

(“Seth, why do human beings eat animals?”)

[...] The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.

The plants awakened before the animals—and there are reasons for these varying degrees of “wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of specieshood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. [...]

In many animal groups the sick animal isolates itself for a period of rest, in which it is also free to seek out those natural conditions most conducive to its health. [...]

This is an abdication of the severest kind, involving both your spirituality and your biological nature; you feel trapped far more than an animal in a dire situation, and you deny yourself the ability to act. [...]

[...] Even the animals seek stimuli and feel a zest for existence; so in this way Dineen, in a misguided manner, is still giving expression to a definite need of her being.

[...] But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.

[...] On the other hand you had an individual aggressively attuned that day with withheld violence, who was going to kill one animal or another. On the other hand you had an animal who went searching for friends, knowing quite well that in one way of speaking the friendship was over.

[...] We will save the matter of the animal until later. [...]

In the first place none of you would have found it comfortable in the long run, to live with an animal that you considered the symbol for failure. [...]

[...] You would not feel free to hunt successfully with the animal, for he was, you felt, the symbol of an unsuccessful hunt in the work world.

[...] In what would appear to be a drawing of an animal, then, the entire history or background of the animal might also be given. [...]

(10:00.) Consider, for example, something very simple — say a drawing of an animal. [...]

[...] Often drawings on the cave walls were highly stylized information, almost like signs in your terms in front of public buildings, portraying the type of animals and beings in a given area.

[...] 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 cells of a man or a woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal,⁴ and of course vice versa. [...]

[...] If you must, then think of that earth consciousness as grading (spelled) upward in great slopes of awareness from relatively “inert” particles of dust and stone through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. [...]

[...] In fact, that consciousness of self in any person is dependent upon the constant, miraculous cooperations that exist between the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds.³ The inner intent always forms any exterior alteration. [...]

4. Jane and I understand Seth’s point when he tells us that “the cells of a man or woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal.” [...]

[...] Plants and animals and all of life’s aspects take it quite for granted that the sun will shine and the rains will fall in the way best conducive to all creatures. Animals certainly do not worry about tomorrow’s weather conditions. (Long pause.) It may be true that animals do not need to know tomorrow’s weather, since they do not plant seeds or collect the harvest. [...]

(With much animation:) As an example, it appears to you that animals do not reflect upon their own reality. [...]

[...] They would be a commonplace in the animal world, for instance; witness the quick deaths of certain newborn kittens in a litter (as Jane and I have); or consider the puppy in an animal shelter, or pound, certain to be put to death in a few days if no one gives it a home. [...]

[...] You preserve these ideas by thinking of animals as beneath you. [...]

[...] Its animation is seen as having no source outside itself. [...]

Without the particular plants, animals, people, or even individual cells or viruses, nature has no meaning. [...]

[...] He is in telepathic communication with animals and other people, and on a different level he is in a kind of communication with plants and other such consciousnesses. [...] The fetus, however, will also react to the death of an animal in the family, and will be acquainted with the unconscious psychic relationships within the family long before it reaches the sixth month.

[...] There is a physical give-and-take between the body and environment beyond that which you recognize; an inner dynamics here that escapes you, that unites the health of plants, animals, and men. In the most simple and mundane of examples, if you are living in a fairly well-balanced, healthy environment, your houseplants and your animals will also be well. [...]

It is equipped, as an animal is, to perform beautifully in its environment. [...] They were indeed as agile as animals — nor were they unconscious.¹⁰ They simply dealt with a different kind of awareness.

[...] These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. [...] Such behavior is possible not only with the animals. [...]

Now in the case of an animal who hibernates, the body is in the same state. [...]