“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

(10:40. During break Jane received some insights from Seth as to what would follow in Chapter Eight — that, for instance, when good thoughts from an individual’s present life were activated, they would draw upon similar ones from his or her reincarnational personalities. This was a very interesting idea, aside from being a comforting one. I couldn’t recall Seth presenting the concept in just that way before. [A note added later: But as things developed, he didn’t begin alluding to it until Chapter Ten.]