“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In their own ways, the animals are quite aware of this fact. Some of them even bring themselves to their own destruction through what you would call suicide, and en masse. At that level the animals understand, and are always in touch with deep biological connections in which they know their own continuances within the chain of nature.

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

Animals, then, do not think of illness in terms of good or bad. Disease in itself on that level is a part of the life-survival process, and a system of checks and balances. With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved. Mankind feels its own mortality even more than the beasts do.

(Pause.) They attract you because of their instinctive knowledge, and they represent the inner freedom that man is in the process of objectifying on a conscious level. They also remind you of the deep certainty of your creaturehood, and by their flight evoke within you the knowledge that you are leaping from creaturehood into dimensions of actuality you only barely sense.