“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your particular society has set up such an artificial division between intuitional and intellectual knowledge that only the intellectually apparent is given credence. With all of their dire faults and distortions, religions have at least kept alive the idea of unseen, valid worlds, and given some affirmation to concepts that are literally known by the cells. Period.

This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greatest fulfillment — the idea of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree do stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed “tree gods,” gods of the forest, and “gods of being” connected with each person.

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.