“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The cells of your physical body incidentally also have their awareness, which may seem minute and insignificant to you, but they make independent decisions upon which you depend in very important degrees. Your term, instinct, is a very unfortunate one, and coined to begin with because you insist that no organism except man has any consciousness.

So-called instinctual actions seem rather automatic to you because they are different from logical thought as you know it. Because for example bees or ants tend to act in a like manner as far as other bees and ants are concerned, because it appears that their actions are as predictable and almost predetermined, man takes it for granted that certain reflexes are absolutes in particular species, and that in any given situation a member of such a species will always react in a certain manner because he cannot help it.

I am afraid I have taken you too deeply into these matters too early. There are no simple answers. There is complexity and growth and the dynamics of vitality always; and these find new forms, new diversions and new creations constantly. Your own animals and all the various species that you know belong to a general grouping, with man presently holding forth.