“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

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.

That kind of “death” is, then, natural in one way or another within your system. I will be speaking here from many viewpoints, and later I will discuss in full your ideas of mortality. Here, however, let me state that all life is cooperative. It also knows it exists beyond its form.

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.

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.

(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.”)

3. This little note fits in here for two reasons: Jane’s pause, and Seth’s discussion of our kind of time. Here’s what I wrote at 9:55 in the 24th session for February 10, 1964: “Jane reports that when she pauses for Seth during a delivery, she can sense the whole concept of the subject being discussed. Subjectively, it appears to ‘hang over her.’ Since on those occasions it’s too much to handle at once, however, she feels Seth withdrawing it, to release it to her a little at a time in the form of connected words.”

4. A typical black hole, according to predictions made by Einstein in his theory of gravity, is thought to be the collapsed remnants of a giant star that’s used up all of its nuclear energy. Its density is unimaginably great, its gravity so powerful that not even light can escape from it. Hence, such an object is invisible, forming a “hole” in space.