“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All of the probabilities practically possible in human development are therefore present to some extent or another in each individual. Any biological or spiritual advancement that you might imagine will of course not come from any outside agency, but from within the heritage of consciousness made flesh. Generally, those alive in this century chose a particular kind of orientation. The species chose to specialize in certain kinds of physical manipulation, to devote its energies in certain directions. Those directions have brought forth a reality unique in its own fashion. Man has not driven himself down a blind alley, in other words. He has been studying the nature of his consciousness — using it as if it were apart from the rest of nature, and therefore seeing nature and the world in a particular light.⁶ That light has finally made him feel isolated, alone, and to some extent relatively powerless (intently).

(We sat quietly. We could hear the automobiles swooshing across the new Walnut Street Bridge that lifted gracefully over the Chemung River, less than a quarter of a block from our apartment house; it had been raining earlier this evening and the traffic noise was softened. Incidentally, in a brief ceremony, the four-lane span had been opened to the public just this morning. Its old fashioned predecessor had been destroyed by Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972; see my notes for the 613th session in Chapter 1 of Personal Reality.

(Pause.) The sleepwalkers, as we will call them, were not asleep to themselves, and would seem so only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. Their [overall] primary experience was outside of the body. The physical corporal existence was a secondary effect. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli, the most focused experience, the most maintained purpose, the most meaningful activity, and the most organized social and cultural behavior. Now this is the other side of your own experience, so to speak. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. The main activity, then, involved consciousness apart from the body. In your terms, physical culture was rudimentary.

Now in the case of an animal who hibernates, the body is in the same state. But in the greater hibernation of your own experience, the body as a whole becomes inoperable. The cells within you obviously die constantly. The body that you have now is not the one that you had 10 years ago; its physical composition has died completely many times since your birth, but, again, your consciousness bridges those gaps (with gestures). They could be accepted instead, in which case it would seem to you that you were, say, a reincarnated self at age 7 (intently), or 14 or 21. The particular sequence of your own awareness follows through, however. In basic terms the body dies often, and as surely as you think it dies but once in the death you recognize. On numerous occasions it physically breaks apart, but your consciousness rides beyond those “deaths.” You do not perceive them. The stuff of your body literally falls into the earth many times, as you think it does only at the “end of your life.”