“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.

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

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.

I found the scientific, systematic categorization of organisms to be fascinating. For man alone the arrangement goes in this descending order from the most inclusive: The kingdom Animalia; phylum Chordata; class Mammalia; order Primates; family Hominidae; genus Homo; species name Homo sapiens; common name Man.

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.”