“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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….”

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.”

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.