“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

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.

You may have dreams urging you to move in such and such a direction, or pointing out areas in which corrections should be made. Often such dreams bring about behavior changes whether or not you remember them in the morning. You may request dreams in which proper direction is given, and you will receive them. If you ask on the one hand, however, and do not believe in the therapeutic nature of dreams on the other, you will short-circuit any such activity. In such a case you are not being honest with the contents of your conscious mind. Instead you are saying, “I will have a dream to help me, and yet I do not believe I can have such a dream.”

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.

(When she read the first page of this session after I’d typed it, Jane said, “It looks like I distorted that bit about atoms ‘dying.’ I don’t think it should be put that way, I guess. Seth must have a lot on that. All I remember is that matter can’t be created or destroyed. And those particles that break off atoms and are released as radiation don’t ‘die’ as far as I know — although they might evolve….?”