“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Then came Jane’s projection-probability experience involving her home town of Saratoga Springs; she described this episode in her notes preceding the 685th session, in Section 1, and Seth elaborated upon it considerably in the next session. The ghostly qualities in that event fit in with what I was trying to do in the painting: By leaving the thick gray and white underpainting of my “portrait” of “Jane” without color, I realized, I could express not only a probable interpretation of her, but the colorless qualities of the Saratoga experience itself. Once I made those conscious connections I was able to finish the painting very easily. I intend to do more work in this manner.

The CU’s, following that analogy, serve as source points or “holes” through which energy falls into your system, or is attracted to it — and in so doing, forms it. The experience of forward time and the appearance of physical matter in space and time, and all the phenomenal world, results. As CU’s leave your system, time is broken down. Its effects are no longer experienced as consecutive, and matter becomes more and more plastic until its mental elements become apparent. New CU’s enter and leave your system constantly, then. Within the system en masse, however, through their great and small organizational structures, the CU’s are aware of everything happening — not only on the top of the moment (gesturing), but within it in all of its probabilities.

(Intently:) I am trying to tell you something about the greater reality of your species, yet to do so with any justice, I must divest you, if possible, of certain concepts about the beginning of time, or “man’s early history.”

Give us a moment … In the body certain cells “kill” others, and in so doing the body’s living integrity is maintained. The cells do each other that service (with gestures). In the exterior world certain animals “kill” others. You had for centuries, then, speaking in your limited terms, a situation in which men and animals were both hunters and prey. In those misty eras⁷ — from your standpoint — these activities were carried on with the deepest, most sacred comprehension. Again, the slain animal knew that it would “later” look out through its slayer’s eyes⁸ — attaining a newer, different kind of consciousness. The man, the slayer, understood the great sense of harmony that existed even in the slaying, and knew that in turn the physical material of his body would be used by the earth to replenish the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

At one time on your earth, in the way you look at time, there were many such species: water dwellers, with brain capacities as good as and better than your own. Your legends of mermaids, for example, though highly romanticized, do indeed hint of one such species’ development. There were several species smaller than the dolphins, but generally the same structurally. Their intelligence was indisputable, and old myths of sea gods arose from such species. There is even now an extremely rich emotional life on the part of the dolphins, to which you are relatively blind; and more than this, on their part a greater recognition of other species than you yourselves have.

The dolphins possess a strong sense of personal loyalty, and an intimate family pattern, along with a highly developed individual and group recognition and behavior. They cooperate with each other, in other words. They go out of their way to help other species, and yet they do not take pets (softly, staring at me). There were also, however, many varieties of water-dwelling mammals — some combining the human with the fish, though roughly along the lines of a combination chimpanzee-fish type, hyphen. These were small creatures who moved with amazing rapidity, and could emerge onto the land for days at a time.

You could (underlined twice) walk into “yesterday” as well as tomorrow at that point of birth — if you could walk — and indeed your perception brings you events both in and out of time sequence. Responses to out-of-time events do not bring the infant recognition, approval, or action, however. It immediately begins to learn to accept certain neurological pulses which bring results, and not others, and so neurological patterns are early learned. This can be a frightening process, though it is accompanied by reassurances. The infant sees, out of context, both present and future without discrimination, and (intently) I am speaking of images physically perceived.

(“It’s wild,” she continued, “but I know that all of this is leading up to alternate man, probable man, and parallel man. [See Appendix 6.] I thought you were tired tonight, but I decided I wanted the session instead of looking at reruns on TV … especially after I got that stuff while I was doing the dishes tonight, on cells and biological prayer.”

9. At once Seth’s material reminded me of a novel about dolphins that Jane worked on in 1963. Her first book-length fiction, The Rebellers, had been published (as a paperback) that summer, and she was experimenting with several new ideas. A couple of months before these sessions began in late November of that year, she wrote an outline and five chapters for a novel about the development of communications between mankind and cetaceans, and called it To Hear A Dolphin. We hadn’t realized it at the time, of course, but it embodied some of the ideas Seth was to enlarge upon in his own material. Jane had time to show her manuscript to one publisher — who rejected it — before the Seth material got under way. To Hear A Dolphin was then laid aside, evidently for good. We still talk about it every so often; we still think its basic premises are good ones. Yet were she to do the book now, Jane says, she’d have to rewrite it completely.