“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Then as we sat for the session Jane told me that after supper tonight she’d picked up material from Seth “that I wasn’t sure of because I didn’t understand what he meant….” Involved were her questions about mammals, species, subspecies, and other classifications of living creatures. I thought it obvious that her two latest intuitions from Seth were directly related—and that certain creative portions of her psyche never stopped “working.” Quickly I tried to explain that in biology the science of classification is called taxonomy. I had only a little success delineating terms like “phylum” and “genus,” since I didn’t have a dictionary handy to refresh my own memory; however, I did help her understand that mammals aren’t a subspecies of any other group, but are themselves a major class of warm-blooded creatures.

Every c-e-l-l (spelled), in those terms, is a sender and a receiver. All of the larger divisions of life—the mammals, fish, birds, and so forth—are an integral part of that living gridwork. The picture of the world is not only the result of those messages transmitted and received, however, but is also caused by the relationships between those messages. In your terms, then (underlined), all of life’s large classifications were present “at the beginning of the world.” Otherwise there would have been vast holes in that grid of perception that makes possible the very sensations of physical life.

Other realities quite as legitimate as your own, quite as vital, quite as “real,” coexist with your own, and in the terms of your understanding, “in the same space”—but of course in terms of your experience those spaces and realities would appear to be quite separate. No systems are closed, however, so that basically (underlined) the living grid of perception that causes one world or reality is also “wired into” all other such systems. There is a give-and-take between them.

In various periods that “gridwork” might “carry more traffic” along certain circuits than at other periods, so that there has been some creative leeway allowed, particularly on the parts of the species that make up your larger classifications. There were always birds, for example, but in the great interplay of “interior” and exterior communication among all portions of this vast living system, there was a creative interplay that allowed for endless variations within that classification, and each other one.

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.

When you ask: “When did the world begin?” or “What really happened?” or “Was there a Garden of Eden?”, you are referring to the world as you understand it, but in those terms there were earths in the same space before the earth you recognize existed,² and they began in the manner that I have given you in the early chapters of this book. The patterns for worlds—the patterns—continue in your time dimension, though in that time dimension those worlds must disappear, again, to continue “their existence outside of time.” The patterns are filled out again.

Since this material must be comprehensible, Ruburt and I together form our own pathway of perceptions—he from his end and me from mine, so that we thread back and forth as if (underlined) through the wiring of some vast computer—but a computer that is alive.

(“Last Saturday morning I had what seemed to be two dreams that were identical and side by side, or at the same time. But they weren’t within the other, as in a double dream—”)

You know you can have more than one dream at a time. You can also experience versions of dreams of probable selves, but there will always be some point of contact—that is, there will always be a reason why you pick up such a dream. All of the dreams people have form a mass dream framework. Dreams exist at other levels, and physically of course they affect the body state. In such ways, the world’s actions are worked out in mass dream communications that are at the same time public and private.

The country works out national concerns in that fashion. You think when you are asleep as well as when you are awake. But when you are asleep your thoughts have a richer dimensional cast: They are fattened by symbols and images.

(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….”

“In color as usual: I can recall hardly any of these, but Jane suggested I write down what I can. I had two dreams, side by side. I believe they were identical to each other, with the same people in each one and the same resolution: a decision I reached in a new house on a hillside. Involved was a male character in a well-known TV program. We saw the show last night. I’m puzzling over how I could have had the dreams beside each other, though; it seems they should have been in sequence. I had no sense of one dream being inside the other one, as in what I call the conventional double dream.”)

2. Seth has told us almost from the beginning of the sessions that in our terms the earth we know is but the latest in a series of earths that have existed in the same “space,” or “value climate of psychological reality.” According to Seth, however, much more is involved. From Session 29, for February 26, 1964 (just 16 years ago): “There are endless planes upon your earth, or rather endless planes occurring simultaneously with your earth. Your solid earth is not a solid to inhabitants that would seem to take up the same space as your earth. The idea of taking up the same space is erroneous to begin with, but I don’t see how we can avoid such terms and still make any sense to you.”

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.”