“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In view of Jane’s own limited knowledge of the scientific vocabulary man has devised to classify just the multitude of living forms alone on our planet, it’s very interesting that Seth used what I think is the correct popular terminology as he went through the session. Even so, however, he still added meanings of his own to some of those basic categories, or taxa.)

(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.

(Now Jane paused several times in her delivery—and I had the feeling that Seth was groping for the words that would make his meaning as clear to us as possible.)

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.

They do indeed. Billy can be as he chooses—reincarnated into any species within his classification—as a mammal.

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….”

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.”

When I asked him in the same session about his evocative use of “fragment,” Seth replied: “That is an original term with me, as far as I know.” Within another couple of sessions, however, he began to let “fragment” semantically yield to other terminology as he continued developing his material in ever-deepening discussions of personalities and entities, reincarnation, time, dreams, and other related subjects. I was surprised when he returned to the word here in Dreams. I’ve designed this note to supplement Jane’s writing on fragments in The Seth Material, which Prentice-Hall published in 1970.

Some years after the 4th session was held, and without telling us anything else about the subject, Seth volunteered the information that his dog fragment had died. We haven’t tried to pursue the matter with him.