“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In those frameworks you have made certain classifications that now appear quite obvious. Common sense upholds them, and it seems impossible to consider reality otherwise. Yet by their nature such categories structure your experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

Thusly, your classifications of various species appear to you as the only logical kinds of divisions that could be made among living things. Quite the contrary is the case, however. That particular overall method of separation leads to such questions as: “Which species came first, and which came later, and how did the various species emerge — one from the other?” Those questions are further brought about by your time classifications, without which they would be meaningless.

Your classifications in such respects set up exterior divisions. Now these serve as quite handy reference points, but basically speaking they in no way affect the natural experience of those various living creatures that you refer to as “other species.”

The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers. Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

The subjective feeling of your being, your intimate experience from moment-to moment — these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to you the universe possesses. You are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework your feelings and thoughts have a reality to you personally that transcends all such classifications. You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somehow eternal.