“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“The same applies of course to any animal or plant considered extinct. Only an objectively tuned consciousness like man’s would imagine that the physical eradication of a species destroyed its existence.”

I surely understand that you want to make the knowledge practical in the physical world, and to help people as much as you can, but that cannot be the only goal — for that goal must always be the high personal exploration of consciousness, the creative and artistic pursuit for which there may be no name. You do not make shoes to put on people’s feet. You do not make deodorants to stop perspiration. If you did either of these things, you could see material results — material results — at once: people with shoes of your making, and people who did not sweat (with some humor). (In parentheses: Such deodorants are highly disadvantageous, incidentally.)

From Session 837 for February 28, held on the evening of the day Billy died: “My dear friends: Existence is larger than life or death. Life and death are both states of existence. An identity exists whether it is in the state of life or in the state of death. Your cat’s consciousness never was dependent upon its physical form. Instead, the consciousness was itself choosing the experience of cathood. There was nothing that said: ‘This consciousness must be a cat.’

“There is no such thing as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses. We have not touched upon some of these matters, and some are, again, most difficult to explain, as we wish to avoid distortions. These would have nothing to do with Ruburt per se, but simply the way you put concepts together at this stage of development.”

From Session 838 for March 5: “I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of the souls of men to animals, say — a badly distorted version of something else entirely. If there is no consciousness ‘tailored’ to be a cat’s or a dog’s, then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either….

“The units of consciousness that organized to form his identity as you knew it, still form that pattern — but not physically. The cat exists as itself in the greater living memory of its own ‘larger’ selfhood. Its organization — the cat’s — exists inviolately, but as a part of the greater psychic organization from which it came.

“That identity of Billy’s remains vital, known to itself whether or not it is reactivated in your terms. This is not necessarily always the case — and there is great variation — but Billy identified with ‘the larger organization’ of the litter [that is, with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are also dead], and the consciousnesses of that litter are now together. They are forming a gestalt, where the five consciousnesses will merge to form a new identity.”

And in closing: The index for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality will contain (when that book is published) a comprehensive list of references to Seth’s discussions of his units of consciousness, or CU’s, as presented in both volumes of that work.