“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(Although she doesn’t usually do such work because of the time required, as well as her own emotional attitudes, Jane had given impressions during the earlier call. She was told now that those impressions had checked out very well, so, in an exchange that lasted for three-quarters of an hour, she gave more such information. She finished with the tentative understanding that by midnight she’d receive another call, after there had been time to check her second set of impressions. Jane laughingly told me that if the new data “wasn’t good enough,” she’d probably never again hear from the people involved — but at this time we didn’t realize what was to follow.

At one time there were also species of birds, however, with high intelligence — this before the period mentioned earlier.² They were not humanoid; not, for example, people with wings. They were large birds, with the capacity for dealing with concepts. They were social, could swim well (pause), and for some time could live on the water. They had songs of great beauty, and a most extensive vocabulary. They had talons. (Her eyes wide and dark, Jane held up her hands, fingers bent as though ready to grasp — or claw.) When he was a cave dweller,³ man saw these birds often, particularly in cliffs by water. Many times the birds saved children from falling. Man identified with their easy flight up the cliffsides, and followed the sounds of their songs to safe clearings. These memories turned into the angel images. In each case in those times there was the greatest cooperation, on a global scale, between species. The inner impetus toward development, however, came from the innate comprehension of future probabilities. In that picture all species alive at any time joined. This included plants and fauna. Those who cooperated survived, but they did not think in terms of the survival of their own species alone — but, in time terms, of a greater living picture, or world inviolate, in which all survived.

There are various orders of existence even within your system itself. You merely focus upon the one to which you are oriented. There are, then, “spirits” of all natural things — but unfortunately, even when you consider such possibilities you project your own religious ideas of good and evil upon them. You may simply dismiss such concepts as silly, for they seem intellectually scandalous to many. If you do entertain such ideas yourself, you must often personify such spirits, projecting upon them your own ideas of personhood. Instead, you should think of them as different kinds or orders of species that are connected with all natural living things.

They certainly have a reality in energy, and they aid in the conversion of energy into physical terms. They are active rather than passive, then. You see about you physical forces and think nothing of them. For example: You feel the wind and its effects, but you cannot see it. The wind itself is invisible. So these other forces are also invisible. In basic terms they are no more good or evil than the wind is. I say this because you usually imagine that if something is good, there must be a countering force that is evil. Such is not the case. In greater terms these forces are good. They are protective. They nourish every living thing. They have been the impetus for what you think of as evolution. They are biological in that they are to some extent composed of mass cellular knowledge — basically free of time, but directing physical activity in time, and thereby maintaining physical equilibrium.

Your conscious mind tells you where you are in time and space, and directs your activity in a world of human action. That world has its own kind of rich complication, that is as unknown to the animals as is much of their acute realization unknown to you. Because you have a conscious mind, then, other portions of your being rely upon it to give them an adequate picture of your situation, and to give the conscious orders for action. These orders will then be carried out. To do this, you must use that mind as completely as possible. The picture of reality in time and space that you give to your cells must be accurate. They must act on a minute-to-minute, second-to-second, microsecond-to-microsecond basis, even though their own orientation is not familiar with your time concept.

3. Nor was I quick enough to ask Seth if the material Jane delivered for him tonight constituted any kind of contradiction with that of the 689th session; for in that session he discussed man-animal and animal-man as existing within the Tertiary Period. Presumably these “mutated forms” had implied the beginnings of man, in ordinary terms, yet now Seth spoke of cave-dwelling humans as coexistent with large birds at an earlier time. Had Jane distorted information in one session or the other? Was it possible that during the complicated rhythms of history, man could have been man (at least approximately as we know him) even before the Tertiary Period, then moved into a long cycle of animal-man forms before returning to being man again? In tonight’s session had Jane tuned into data on a parallel (or probable) reality, for example? Too involved to determine, these questions, on too little material.

(And just as I added much later to Note 7 for Session 688: Even though we were interested in questions of human origins, in those terms, we never resolved them before Seth finished “Unknown” Reality.)