“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I mentioned earlier, each person lives both male and female lives. As a rule, conscious memory of these is not retained. To prevent an overidentification of the individual with his present sex, within the male there resides an inner personification of femaleness. This personification of femaleness in the male is the true meaning of what Jung called the “anima.”

The anima in the male is, therefore, the psychic memory and identification of all the previous female existences in which the inner self has been involved. It contains within it the knowledge of the present male’s past female histories, and the intuitive understanding of all the female qualities with which the personality is innately endowed.

(Pace slower.) They not only have a reality in the psyche, however, but they are imbedded in genetically codified data by the inner self — a genetic memory of past psychic events — transposed into the genetic memory of the very cells that compose the body.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved. Now the present characteristics usually overshadow the past ones. They are dominant, but the other characteristics are latent and present, built into the pattern. The physical pattern of the present body, therefore, is a genetic memory of the self’s past physical forms, and of their strengths and weaknesses. (10:29. Jane rubbed her eyes; she was speaking slowly, with many pauses.)

They are kept in abeyance, so to speak. They are connected electromagnetically to the atomic structure of the present body. To your way of thinking, they would be unfocused. They are a part of your psychic heritage, however. Often you can call up a past strength of a previous body, to help compensate for a present weakness. The body does not only carry memory biologically of its own past condition in this life therefore, but indelibly with it, even physically, are the memories of the other bodies that the personality has formed in previous reincarnations.

They are, of course, both male and female. When you are ill, in the dream state you often have experiences in which you seem to be someone else with an entirely healthy body. Often such a dream is therapeutic. An “older” reincarnational body has come to your aid, from which you draw strength through the memory of its health.