“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….