“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

7. Just a week ago, in the 686th session, I asked Seth to comment on our ancient origins, but without getting an answer. At this writing, then, we still don’t know what period in our past he’s referring to. Evidently it’s a very long time ago; even in conventional paleontological terms, recent discoveries in East Africa place a toolmaking man in action 3 million years ago, with a lineage possibly going back 14 million years. Now we plan to ask Seth to develop his man-animal material soon, adding more specifics and including the probabilities involved.

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.