“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.

(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.

(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.

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

(“That isn’t going to run into the idea of transmigration, is it?” I was thinking that man is also a mammal.)

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.