“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.

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.

Now: This means that biologically the cell is aware of all of its probable variations, while in your time and structures it holds its unique position as a part, say, of any given organ in your body. (Pause.) In greater terms the cell is a huge physical universe, orbiting an invisible CU; and in your terms the CU will always be invisible — beyond the smallest phenomenon that you can perceive with any kind of instrument. To some extent, however, its act can be indirectly apprehended through its effect upon the phenomenon that you can perceive.

The EE units mentioned earlier⁵ represent the stage of emergence, the threshold point that practically activates the CU’s, in your terms. We will have more to say about these later.

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.

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.”