“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The deeper explanations, however, demand a further expansion of ideas of consciousness, and a certain reorientation. It is extremely important that you bear in mind the importance of free will, and the presence of your own identity as you think of it. With that preamble, let me continue then.

(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.

(A one-minute pause at 9:50, head bowed, eyes closed.) The organizations of consciousness “grow” even as cells grow into organs. Groups of probable selves, then, can and do form their own identity structure, which is quite aware of the probable selves involved. In your reality, experience is dependent upon time, but all experience is not so structured. There are, for example, parallel events that are followed as easily as you follow consecutive events.

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.

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.