“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All probable worlds exist now. All probable variations on the most minute aspect in any reality exist now. You weave in and out of probabilities constantly, picking and choosing as you go along. The cells within your body do the same thing.

(Slowly:) I told you once that there were pulses of activity in which you blinked off and on — this applying even to atomic and subatomic particles.¹ “You” assign as real — present here and now — only that activity that is your signal. “You” are not aware of the others. When people think in terms of one self, they of course identify with one body. You know that the cellular structure of it changes constantly. The body is at any given moment, however, a mass conglomeration of energy formed from that rich bank of probable activity. The body is not stable in the terms usually thought of. On deeper biological levels the cells straddle probabilities, and trigger responses. Consciousness rides upon and within the pulses mentioned earlier, and forms its own organizations of identity. Each probability — probable only in relation to and from the standpoint of another probability — is inviolate, however, in that it is not destroyed. Once formed, the pattern will follow its own nature.

Give us a moment … True order and organization, even of biological structure, can be achieved only by granting a basic unpredictability. I am aware that this sounds startling. Basically, however, the motion of any wave or particle or entity is unpredictable — freewheeling and undetermined. Your life structure is a result of that unpredictability. Your psychological structure is also. However, because you are presented with a fairly cohesive picture, in which certain laws seem to apply, you think that the laws come first and physical reality follows. Instead, the cohesive picture is the result of the unpredictable nature that is and must be basic to all energy.

In your terms, consciousness is able to hold its own sense of identity by accepting one probability, one physical life, for example, and maintaining its identity through a lifetime. Even then, certain events will be remembered and others forgotten. The consciousness also learns to handle alternate moments as it “matures.” As it does so mature it forms a new, larger framework of identity, as the cell forms into an organ on another level.

(Pause at 10:36.) Ruburt is at this moment feeling massive.* He is experiencing several things. The inner cellular body consciousness feels itself massive, while to you cells are minute. The sounds of the package, for example (as Seth, Jane crumpled an empty cigarette package), or the fingernails across the table (demonstrated), are magnified, for in the cellular world they are an important outside-the-self cosmic event — messages of great importance. The cellular consciousness experiences itself as eternal, though to you the cells have a brief life. But those cells are aware of the body’s history, in your terms, and in a much more familiar fashion than you are aware of the earth’s history.

The cells are also aware of probabilities in a more familiar fashion than you are, as they manipulate the past and future history of the body. Ruburt now, again, is experiencing massiveness, as in your idea of probabilities the cellular structure feels its vast endurance. Working with events not even real to you, it produces a physical structure that maintains identity and predictability out of a vastly creative network. That network is unpredictable, yet from it Ruburt can predictably put ashes into that shell. (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.

Again, Ruburt is still experiencing massiveness…. All of the atoms and molecules that have composed your body since your birth, and will compose it until your death, in your terms, exist now; so even your knowledge of the body is experienced in a time form — that is, bit by bit.

(Long pause at 11:05.) Part of Ruburt’s feeling of massiveness comes from the mass experience of the body, existing all at once. Therefore to him the body feels larger. Calculations impossible to describe occur, so that from this basic unpredictability you experience what seem to be predictable actions. This is only because you focus upon those actions that “make sense” in your reality, and ignore all others. I am not speaking symbolically, of course, when I say you died as a youngster. Nor was any harsh reality forced upon the mother by the dying child, for that portion of your mother was the part that regretted having had the child.

(11:15. “And when there isn’t any sound outside, everything’s ringing — the way your ears do, only more so … Now my whole body’s really big. Massive. I might end it. It’s funny: It’s not terribly pleasant. My teeth seem really huge — everything — my feet …”

(As she ate Jane said, “The noises in my mouth are real loud — you’re not used to it.” When she sipped beer, she felt the cold liquid descend inside her body, but displaced to the right of her esophagus. She recited a list of opposing feelings in her own body that she was simultaneously aware of in her “bigger body”: Her right foot was very cold, her back very hot … I got her a sweater, for our living room had cooled off. The February night was very cold.

1. In several of the sessions he delivered in 1970–71 for Seth Speaks, Seth explained how atoms and molecules phase in and out of our physical system. See especially the 567th session in Chapter 16: “Now the same sort of behavior occurs on a deep, basic, secret and unexplored psychological level.” Some of the probable systems arising out of such activity would be quite alien to us: “One such fluctuation might take several thousand of your years … [which] would be experienced, say, as a second of your time …” Jane elaborates upon related ideas from her own viewpoint in Chapter 10, among others, in her Adventures in Consciousness.

“… Needless to say, I wanted you to know that there is much more than even this, complexities that are truly astounding, intelligences that operate in what I suppose you would call a gestalt fashion, building blocks of vitalities of truly unbelievable maturity, awareness, and comprehension. These are the near ultimate [as I understand such things] .

“Now: Often precognitive information will appear to be wrong. In some cases this is because a self has chosen a different probable event for physical materialization [than the one predicted]. I have access to the field of probabilities and you do not, egotistically…. To me, your past, present, and future merge into one.

To simplify a great deal: In modern physics it’s said that atoms are processes, not things; that atoms and/or their constituents can appear as either waves or particles, depending on how we observe them; and that these qualities exist outside of our coarse world of space and time. Atoms are patterns of probabilities. It’s further said that our attempts to describe or visualize such nonphysical qualities inevitably cause us to misinterpret them; so the artist wonders whether the atom’s movement in more than one direction at once may not be perfectly “natural” in its own environment — some sort of ability quite separate from any play we may indulge in with words while trying to consciously comprehend it.

8. Jane’s assertion tonight that she felt a humanoid aspect of herself reminded me of the material she’d given almost a year ago in Chapter 12 of Personal Reality, on “the idea of natural therapy in animals,” and animal medicine men. She came up with that information on her own, too, and during a session break. On that occasion she was more of an observer. There was quite a difference in “physical size” between the images she had seen then and her visions of herself this evening; yet there were similarities also, for of that earlier experience she said “I saw creatures who walked upright — hairy, with brilliant compassionate eyes …” See the 648th session at 11:30.