“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As your cells have their own memories, so the conscious mind has a more overt kind of memory. Your conscious thoughts act as triggers, bringing both kinds of memory into activation. Within your physical being then each joyful, expanding, traumatic and tragic “past” event lies indelibly written. In your terms this is your working material, the memory of your physical being since the time of its conception in corporeal form. There are [in your memory] the most complex organizations and associative frameworks, that exist both in the depths of your cellular structure and in the highest reaches of your conscious activity.

Earlier I compared your thoughts to viruses (in the last session). Think of them now as living electromagnetic cells, differing from the physical cells in your body only in the nature of their materialization. Your thoughts direct the overall functioning of your body’s cells, even though you do not consciously know how those cells operate. That work is unconscious.

Each physical cell is in its way a miniature brain, with memory of all of its personal experiences and of its relationship with other cells, and with the body as a whole. In your terms this means that each cell operates with an innate picture of the body’s entire history — past, present, and future.

Now this picture is ever-changing and mobile. An alteration in just one cell is instantly noted by the body consciousness (the combined consciousnesses of the cells), and the future effect perceived. This information is used together with all other data from the body, and a prediction made.

(9:21.) This body prediction is then assessed, and on more levels than it is possible for me to explain. Briefly, the picture is “shown” in the invisible arena where flesh and spirit meet. This arena is not a place, of course, but an inner state of gestalt consciousness. The state is brought about through certain interactions that occur deep within the body. Magnetic structures are formed. They are created on a physical level through certain activations of the nerves in which the normal patterns are jumped, so to speak, and images are formed. The nerves and the cellular structures at their tips take pictures. These are all assembled and used to form the larger picture of the body’s condition.

These are not images as you think of them but highly coded information, electromagnetically imprinted, that would not appear as images to the physical eye. In any case they cannot be perceived except by the body. But this procedure is so far superior to anything that you know that the body, therefore, actually takes precognitive pictures of its future condition — as if the body situation at the time were projected into the future.

This predictive picture is then set against two models. First it is checked against the body’s ideal standard of health in its individual case — its own greatest fulfillment. Then it is checked against the image of the body sent to it by the conscious self. Correlations are made instantaneously. In an organizational framework that would certainly be envied by the most advanced technological concern, communications spring back and forth with great rapidity. The body makes whatever changes are necessary in order to bring the two images in line with the present corporeal condition.

There is a built-in equilibrium to some extent. The body is so responsive to conscious thought that it has its own innate system of self-preservation and its own guiding image of fulfillment.

There were countless other events that happened to you on different afternoons at the same hour, both before and after that one. The cells within your hand contain within themselves memories your conscious mind would be dazzled to behold. Yet remember that the cells in your twenty-seven-year-old hand are in no physical way the same cells that experienced any of those events. In some underground of sensation, however, the buried evidences of stimuli and reaction experienced during those numberless “past” afternoons still exist. Some of those memories will certainly be played back, to affect what you think of as your current experience at twenty-seven. Your conscious thoughts and habits regulate which of them will intermix into the maelstrom of the present.

You consciously give the signals for reaction. It is not the other way around. Past events do not intrude in this manner unless they are beckoned by the conscious expectations and thoughts that exist within your mind. (Pause.) Those unconscious memories will be activated according to your current beliefs. You will be replenished and renewed as your thoughts motivate joyful body sensations and physical events, or you will be depressed as you bring into your awareness unpleasant past body happenings.

At times of course both can be highly beneficial. A conscious realization of danger, for example, will call up all information dealing with similar situations, so that the body can deal with it at once from the vast bank of its living memory. But constant unpleasant thoughts put the body into a state of turmoil that is “unrealistic,” and, in turn, force it to reactivate such old patterns.

(Long pause at 10:01, eyes closed.) The living flesh is quite aware of certain facts that escape you on a conscious level. It knows it dies and is reborn constantly, and yet retains itself. I use the terms “dies” and “is reborn” because you make sense of them, but the body does not. The body, while being always itself, comes and goes. It does not feel less or diminished when a cell dies, for it is also in the process of forming a new one.

For a moment, think of your body as one large cell in the moment of its being. You, the larger self, have many bodies, each turning into the other as one dies and is reborn; yet You (capital Y) maintain your identity and your memory even as the smallest cell in your present body does.

This is merely an analogy but it will explain your body’s concept of itself; for as a whole it knows it “dies,” as now its portions do, but is also aware of its “future” transformation. Within this framework it protects and maintains its own stability and survival.

At one level of your being there is a common ground where body consciousness merges with that higher consciousness from which your own identity springs. This is the ground of your being where soul and flesh meet, both in time and out of it.

Now: Because you are conscious of being, you form your physical reality through conscious thought.

I am quite aware that I am repeating myself again and again when I make that statement, but you need to be reminded that you are not at the mercy of unconscious events. You have the body’s innate wisdom behind you and it will always try to correct your errors.

These suggestions will appear in numberless ways — some quite physical to your way of thinking, and some through other means. The body may of itself begin to crave certain foods, for example, or fresh air or exercise. These are simple instances, and later we will be more specific.

In all cases when you are concerned about your health, there is a choice of directions for you to follow. The living flesh is yours. It is the materialization of your soul, and through the body the soul will provide you with those answers you require. In the next chapter we will begin to discuss those methods that can be used to refresh and heal the body, and that will help you arouse from within the physical form those memories and experiences most to your advantage. For best results, you must remember that ideas are as alive as the cells within your hand.

(We’ve been especially interested in such material since Seth referred to the “deaths” of atoms and molecules in the 625th session in Chapter Five, but we haven’t asked for more detail because the subject matter is somewhat outside the scope of this book. In physics it is “known,” for instance, that the proton, an elementary particle in the atomic nucleus, has an exceptionally long life in years — the number one followed by twenty-four [or more] zeros. When Seth finishes Personal Reality we plan to ask him to reconcile such data from our world with the root assumptions, or basic agreements, in his own reality.