“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The CU’s, or units of consciousness,^l are literally in every place and time at once. They possess the greatest adaptability, and a profound “inborn” propensity for organization of all kinds. They act as individuals, and yet each carries within it a knowledge of all other kinds of activity that is happening in any other given unit or group of units.

Coming together, the units actually form the systems of reality in which they have their experience. In your system, for example, they are within the phenomenal world. They will always come under the guise of any particular pattern of reality, then. In your terms they can move forward or backward in time, but they also possess another kind of interior mobility within time as you know it.

As there are insides to apples, so think of the ordinary moment as an apple. In usual experience, you hold that apple in your hand, or eat it. Using this analogy, however, the apple itself (as the moment) would contain infinite variations of itself within itself. These CU’s therefore can operate even within time, as you understand it, in ways that are most difficult to explain. Time not only goes backward and forward, but inward and outward. I am still using your idea of time here to some degree. (Pause.) Later in this book I hope to lead you beyond it entirely. But in the terms in which I am speaking, it is the inward and outward directions of time that give you a universe that seems to be fairly permanent, and yet is also being created.

(10:04.) No energy is ever lost. It may seem to disappear from one system, but if so, it will emerge in another. The inward and outward thrust that is not perceived is largely responsible for what you think of as ordinary consecutive time. (Pause.³) It is of the utmost and supreme importance, of course, that these CU’s are literally indestructible. They can take any form, organize themselves in any kind of time-behavior, hyphen, and seem to form a reality that is completely dependent upon its apparent form and structure. Yet, disappearing through one of the physicists’ black holes,⁴ for example, though structure and form would seem to be annihilated and time drastically altered, there would be an emergence at the other end, where the whole “package of a universe,” having been closed in the black hole, would be reopened.

There is the constant surge into your universe of new energy through infinite minute sources. The sources are the CU’s themselves. In their own way, and using an analogy, now, in certain respects at least the CU’s operate as minute but extremely potent black holes and white holes, as they are presently understood by your physicists. Give us a moment …

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.

It is vital that you understand this inward and outward thrust of “time,” however, and realize that from this flows the consecutive appearance of the moment. The thrusting gives dimensions to time that so far you have not even begun to realize. Again, you live on the surface of the moments, with no understanding of the unrecognized and unofficial realities that lie beneath. All of this, once more, is tied in with your accepted neurological recognition of certain messages over others, your mental prejudice that effectively blinds you to other quite valid biological communications that are indeed present all of the “time”.

(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.”

The CU’s form all systems simultaneously. Having formed yours, and from their energy diversifying themselves into physical forms, they were aware of all of the probable variations from any given biological strain. There was never any straight line of development as, say, from reptiles to mammal, ape, and man. Instead there were great, still-continuing, infinitely rich parallel explosions of life forms and patterns in as many directions as possible. There were animal-men and man-animals, using your terms, that shared both time and space for many centuries.⁶ This is, as you all well know, a physical system in time. Here cells die and are replaced. Knowing their own indestructibility, the CU’s within them simply change form, retaining however the identity of all the cells that they have been. (Intently:) While the cell dies physically, its inviolate nature is not betrayed. It is simply no longer physical.

The experience of your species involves a certain kind of consciousness development, highly vital. (Pause.) This necessitated a certain kind of specialization, a certain “long-term” identification with form. Cellular structure maintains brilliant effectiveness in the body’s present reality, but knows itself free of it. Man’s particular kind of consciousness fiercely identified with the body. This was a necessity to focus energy toward physical manipulation. To some important extent the same applies to the animals. The cell might gladly “die,” but the specifically oriented man-and-animal consciousness would not so willingly let go.

The cell is individual, and struggles for rightful survival. Yet its time is limited, and the body’s survival is dependent upon the cell’s innate wisdom: The cell must die finally for the body to survive, and only by dying can the cell further its own development, and therefore insure its own greater survival. So the cell knows that to die is to live.

Man’s consciousness, and to some extent that of the animals, is more specifically identified with form, however. In order to develop his own kind of individualized awareness, man had to consciously ignore for a while his own place within the structure of the earth. His experience of time would seem to be the experience of his identity. His consciousness would not seem to flow into his body before birth, and out of it after death. He would “forget” there was a time to die. He would forget that death meant new life. A natural message had to replace the old knowledge.

Even when you lost sight — as you knew you would — of those deep connections, they would continue to operate until, in its own way, man’s consciousness could rediscover the knowledge and put it to use — deliberately and willfully, thereby bringing that consciousness to flower. In your terms this would represent a great leap, for the egotistically aware individual would fully comprehend unconscious knowledge and act on his own, out of choice. He would become a conscious co-creator. Obviously, this has not as yet occurred.

I told you (after 10:26 in this session) that you presently perceive only the surface of the moment; so you also perceive but one line of the species’ development. Yet even within your system, there are hints of the other probable realities that also coexist. The dolphins are a case in point.⁹ In your line of probability they are oddities, yet even now you recognize their great brain capacity, and to some dim extent glimpse the range of their own communication.

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.

The physical universe serves then as a threshold for probabilities, and all possible species find their greatest fulfillment within that system, each of them neurologically tuned into their own reality and their own “time.” So the body itself, as it presently exists, is innately equipped with other neurological responses that to you would seem to be biologically invisible. Nevertheless, your consciousness and your beliefs are what direct this neurological recognition. At birth, and before structured learning processes begin, you are far freer in that regard.

Nightmares on the part of children often operate as biological and psychic releases, during which buried out-of-time perceptions emerge explosively — events perceived that cannot be reacted to effectively in the face of parental conditioning. The body, then, is indeed a far more wondrous living mechanism than you realize. It is the body’s own precognitions¹⁰ that allows the child to develop, to speak and walk and grow.

In the same manner, the species as you think of it is at one level aware of its own probabilities and “future” lines of development. The child learning to walk may fall and hurt itself, yet it does learn. In the same way the race makes errors — and yet in response to its own greater knowledge it continues to seek out those areas of its own probable fulfillment.

2. In general, given the nature of the CU’s — Seth’s postulated “basic” units of consciousness that make up all realities — closed systems cannot exist. From Session 581 in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks: “Basically, however, no system is closed. Energy flows freely from one to another, or rather permeates each. It is only the camouflage [physical] structure that gives the impression of closed systems, and the law of inertia does not apply. It appears to be a reality only within your own framework and because of your limited focus.”

Then, for some early quotes from Seth about his own ability to move among certain systems of reality, see Note 4 for the 680th session in this volume.

(Seth, in the 512th session in Chapter 1 of Seth Speaks: “Now at times I will be using the term ‘camouflage,’ referring to the physical world to which the outer ego relates, for physical form is one of the camouflages that reality adopts.”)

And added later: Also in that session, Seth describes how he must “disentangle concepts” from their patterns in order to relate them through Jane. His material on this will be given in an appendix for Session 711, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. In that appendix I assemble from various sessions information on the complex relationships involving Jane-Ruburt-Seth (and also Rob-Joseph).

A note added later: Unfortunately, we never did receive the kind of information we wanted here, especially that on human origins, before Seth finished “Unknown” Reality. The main reason? I became so occupied with the succeeding sessions of this manuscript that I forgot to make the request.

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.