“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:30 in an intent delivery.) The grids of perception that compose your world give you the world picture as you (underlined) experience it because your physical senses put you in a certain position within the entire grid. Animals, for example, while part of your experience, are also “tuned into” that grid at another level. The large classifications of mammals, fish, birds, men, reptiles, plants, and so forth, are [each] an integral part of that larger perceptive pattern—and that pattern (underlined) in those terms had to be complete even in the beginning of your time.

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.

That is something else—that is, men being born as animals. I am including man as his own classification. Remember, however, there are also fragments, which [again] is something else.⁴

(10:25 P.M. “Gee, I have the feeling that we had a fantastic session,” Jane enthused once she’d quickly left her trance state. I agreed. “I’m really making an effort to free myself from what science believes about evolution, or anything like that,” she said. “That’s what I got before the session—about animals reincarnating—and I thought: Oh, no. But it worked out okay.” Neither of us could remember Seth stating flat out in any of his material that animals reincarnate, although he may have done so. “After all of this time,” Jane mused, “he says that….”

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.

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. Various interpretations of transmigration are ancient in many cultures. 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.”

In the 4th session for December 8, 1963, the personality Jane and I had been contacting through the Ouija board, Frank Withers, spelled out with the board’s pointer the message that he preferred to be called Seth—and Seth it’s been ever since. Shortly before he announced himself as Seth, I’d asked Frank Withers if people were ever “reborn as animals.” His answer was as direct as possible: “No.” Next I asked him: “Is part of your psyche alive on earth now?” The answer was very strange to us at the time: “Very small part. I hardly miss it. I watch it but I leave it alone. It is a dog fragment.” Frank Withers would not give us the location of this dog: “No.”