“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For now, dictation: As most of you know, the atoms that compose your cells, as well as the cells themselves, constantly die and are replaced. The stuff of the internal organs changes and yet they always retain their form. Their identity is intact.

So is your own identity secure in the midst of all these births and deaths of which your conscious self is unaware. The memory of all of its experiences is retained. Each cell remembers its past though all of its parts have been and are being continually replaced.³

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.

Say that at the age of four you were severely injured. An accident took place at 3:20 in the afternoon. It was snowing. Your mother was roasting a turkey. Imagine that you burned a hand severely. Though all of the tissue in that hand has often been completely replaced by the time you are twenty-seven, for example, the identity within each of those present cells remembers that injury.

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.

(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.

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.

1. According to scientists, viruses are ultramicroscopic units that can cause diseases in plants and animals. They multiply only in connection with live cells, and are thought of both as living organisms and as complicated proteins. Few scientists would grant thoughts the same kind of validity, though.

3. Let’s define the cell in ordinary terms as a tiny, very complex unit of protoplasm. It’s usually made up of a nucleus, a semifluid living matter, and a membrane. Seth’s ideas of cellular memory, however, add many new dimensions….