“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Pause.) The world as you know it exists as it does because you are yourself a living portion of a vast “conscious grid” of perception.

Your technological communication system is a conscious construct—a magnificent one—but one that is based upon your innate knowledge of the inner, cellular communication between all species. Saying that, I am not robbing the intellect of its right to congratulate itself upon that technology.

(9:42.) The large classifications of life give you the patterns into which consciousness forms itself, and because those patterns seem relatively stable it is easy to miss the fact that they are filled out, so to speak, in each moment with new energy. Man does not in his physical development pass through the stages supposedly followed by the hypothetical creature who left the water for the land to become a mammal—but each species does indeed have written within it the knowledge of “its past.” Part of this, again, is most difficult to express, and I must try to fill out old words with new meanings. (Pause.) The reincarnational aspects of physical life, however, serve a very important purpose, providing an inner subjective background. Such a background is needed by every species.

Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its “reincarnational” existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification.¹ This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. 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. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it (intently). In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind.

(10:03.) In the case of earth the grid of perception is simply used differently, certain areas becoming prominent in some eras, and less prominent in others. Using your idea of time, I can only say that when the entire gestalt of consciousnesses that formed a particular earth have formed its reality to the best of their abilities, fulfilling their individual and mass capacities as far as possible, then they lovingly turn over that grid to others, and continue to take part in existences that are not physical in your terms. And that has happened many times.

Your tale about the Garden of Eden, then, is a legend about earth’s last beginning. Each world is so cunningly constructed, again, that each consciousness, regardless of its degree, plays a vital part. And each of your actions, however inconsequential, becomes connected in one way or another—in one way or another—to each other reality and each other world (all with much emphasis).

Now in a manner of speaking—though I see that little time has passed in this living room where I speak with Ruburt’s permission—we have transcended time to some extent this evening, for in what I have said there are indeed hints and illusions—cadences—that can, if you are ready, give you a feeling for existence as it is outside of time’s context. Even to try and verbally present such material necessitates alterations involving perception, for while that gridwork appears quite stable to your senses, giving you a reliable picture of reality, this is also because you have trained yourselves to pick up certain signals only. Others at other levels are (underlined) available. You can (underlined) tune into cellular consciousness, for example.

(“In a session I’m working with now for Mass Events—the 837th, about the death of our cat, Billy One, a year ago—you said there wasn’t any such thing as a cat consciousness, per se.”³ Seth nodded. “Tonight’s session reminds me of that one. I see how they fit together.”)

1. Seth is telling us a great deal here, on a subject Jane and I have done little to explore with him. We’d like to know much more. Mammals are animals of the highest class of warm-blooded vertebrates, the Mammalia. They are usually hairy, and their young are fed with milk secreted by the female. Dogs, cats, manatees, lions, dolphins, apes, bats, whales, shrews, sloths, and deer are mammals, to name just a few. I’m interpreting Seth to say that a consciousness can choose to range among such forms. However, for reasons to be hinted at later in the session, the primate man (who is also a mammal) falls outside of Seth’s meaning here.

In that 8th session Seth gave us more material on fragments: “In some submerged manner all fragments of a personality exist within an entity, with their own individual consciousnesses. They are not aware of the entity itself…. The entity operates its fragments in what you would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragments independent life, then more or less forgets them…. Even thoughts, for instance, are fragments, though on a different plane.” Then Jane dictated a key sentence: “Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.”