“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

In that 8th session Seth gave us more material on fragments: “In some submerged manner all fragments of a personality exist within an entity, with their own individual consciousnesses. They are not aware of the entity itself…. The entity operates its fragments in what you would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragments independent life, then more or less forgets them…. Even thoughts, for instance, are fragments, though on a different plane.” Then Jane dictated a key sentence: “Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.”

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.