“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In other probabilities, water-dwelling mammals predominate. They farm the land as you farm the water, and are only now learning how to operate upon the land for any amount of time, as you are only now learning how to manipulate below the water.

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.

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.

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.

(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.”

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.