“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:34.) Now, certain individuals glimpse this great natural healing ability of the body, and use it. Doctors sometimes encounter it when a patient with a so-called incurable disease suddenly recovers. “Miraculous” healings are simply instances of nature unhampered. Complete physicians, as mentioned earlier,⁹ would be persons who understood the true nature of the body and its own potentials — persons who would therefore transmit such ideas to others and encourage them to trust the validity of the body. Some of the body’s abilities will seem impossible to you, for you have no evidence to support them. Many organs can completely replace themselves; diseased portions can be replaced by new tissue.

Under certain conditions, therefore, the body can maintain itself while the “main consciousness” is away from it. The body consciousness is quite able, then, to provide the overall equilibrium. At certain levels of the sleep state this does in fact happen. In sleepwalking the body is active, but the main consciousness is not “awake.” It is not manipulating the body. The main consciousness is elsewhere. Under such conditions the body can perform tasks and often maneuver with an amazing sense of balance. This finesse, again, hints at physical abilities not ordinarily used. The main consciousness, because of its beliefs, often hampers such manipulability in normal waking life.

It is equipped, as an animal is, to perform beautifully in its environment. You would call it mindless, since it would seem not to reason. For the purpose of this discussion alone, imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not diseased for any reason or defective by birth, but one without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that you have. There have been species of such a nature. In your terms they would seem to be like sleepwalkers, yet their physical abilities surpassed yours. They were indeed as agile as animals — nor were they unconscious.¹⁰ They simply dealt with a different kind of awareness.

In some of their own private dreams, many of my readers will have discovered a reality quite as vivid as the normal one, and sometimes more so. These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. Under certain conditions, for example, consciousness can leave the corporal mechanism while it remains intact — functioning, but at a maintenance level. When optimum conditions return, then the consciousness reactivates the body. Such behavior is possible not only with the animals. In systems different from your own, there are realities in which physical organisms are activated after what would seem to you to be centuries of inactivity¹² — again, when the conditions are right. To some extent your own life-and-death cycles are simply another aspect of the hibernation principle as you understand it. Your own consciousness leaves the body almost in the same way that messages leap the nerve ends.¹³ The consciousness is not destroyed in the meantime.

Some individuals find themselves with memories of other lives, which are other days to the soul. Such persons then become aware of a greater consciousness reaching over those gaps, and realize that earthly experience can contain [among other things] a knowledge of existence in more than one body. Inherently then consciousness, affiliated with the flesh, can indeed carry such comprehensions. The mind of man as you know it shows at least the potential ability for handling a kind of memory with which you are usually not acquainted. This means that even biologically the species is equipped to deal with different sequences of time, while still manipulating within one particular time scheme. This also implies a far greater psychological richness — quite possible, again, within corporal reality — in which many levels of relationships can be handled. Such inner knowledge is inherent in the cells, and in ordinary terms of evolution is quite possible as a “future” development.

While that emotionally invisible belief is carried, then anything the self does must be scrutinized, put to the test; in the meantime beliefs that have sustained others are suspended. The development of Ruburt’s abilities would, therefore, lead him away from comforting structures while he searched for others to sustain him …

(3. Appendix 10 [for Session 692], on Jane’s efforts to make a “middle ground” between the extremes of society’s reactions to her psychic abilities: rejection by the conventionally closed-minded at one end, and gullible acceptance at the other.

12. And added two weeks or so later: I see connections between the “centuries of inactivity” that Seth describes in this (708th) session, and certain unique psychic abilities of Jane’s — namely, those involving “massiveness” and “long sound.” In Volume 1, see not only Session 681 between 10:22 and 11:47 for data on one of her massive experiences, but that session’s accompanying Appendix 3. Then in this section of Volume 2, see both Note 9 and Appendix 19 for the 712th session, concerning material on Jane’s long-sound trances; during one of these it could theoretically take her a week — or a century — of our time to pronounce just one syllable of one word.