“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You think that your own consciousness is the only logical culmination of your body’s reality. You read yourself in a certain accepted fashion. In the “entire book of life,” however, just physically speaking, there are interrelationships on adjacent levels that you do not perceive, as other portions of your own biological consciousness or biological language relate to the entire living fabric of the world. In physical terms you are alive because of substructures — psychic, spiritual, and biological — of which you have hardly any comprehension at all.

These are implied, however, in the nature of your own consciousness, which could not exist otherwise as you know it. As language gains and attains its meaning not only by what is included in it, but also by what is excluded, so your consciousness attains its stability also by exclusions.

Within your biological experience, however, plant, mineral, animal, and human consciousness intersect. They encounter each other. In the language of the self that you speak, these encounters are like the implied pauses in your verbal language. These other kinds of consciousness then form inner rhythms upon which you superimpose your own.

These encounters of consciousness go on constantly. They form their own kind of adjacent identities. You would call them subspecies of consciousness, perhaps, but they are really identities that operate in a trans-species fashion.

If you “read yourselves” sideways in such a manner, you would discover portions of your own consciousness stretching out across the entire fabric of the earth as you understand it — becoming a part of the earth’s material, even as those materials become part of the self that you recognize. Your consciousness would be far less hemmed in. Time would expand adjacently. You think of yourselves physically as “top dogs,” however, separate from the other species and kinds of life, so that in effect you limit your own experience of your psyche.

If you thought or felt in such a fashion, then you would appreciate the fact that biologically your body is yours by virtue of the mineral, plant and animal life from which it gains its sustenance. You would not feel imprisoned as you often do within one corporal form, for you would understand that the body itself maintains its relative stability because of its constant give-and-take with the materials of the earth that are themselves possessed of consciousness.

(Long pause at 10:55.) Give us a moment… You read yourself in too-narrow terms. Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality. You fight pain because you have not learned to transcend it, or rather to use it. You do not trust the natural consciousness of the body, so that when its end nears — and such an end is inevitable — you do not trust the signals that the body gives, that are meant to free you.

Certain kinds of pain automatically eject consciousness from the body. Such pain cannot be verbalized, for it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a tearing free, and it automatically brings about an almost exhilarating release of consciousness. Such pain is also very brief. Under your present system, however, drugs are usually administered, in which case pain is somewhat minimized, but prolonged — not triggering the natural release mechanisms.

If you read your selves adjacently, you would build up confidence in the body, and in those cooperative consciousnesses that form it. You would have an intimate awareness of the body’s healing processes also. You would not fear death as annihilation, and would feel your own consciousness gently disentangle itself from those others that so graciously couched it.