“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:16.) There are cycles in which consciousness forms earthly experience, and maps out historical sequences. So there have been other species of mankind beside your own, each handling physical data in its own way. Some have taken other directions, therefore, than the one that you have chosen. Even those paths are latent or secondary, however, within your own private and mass experience. They reside within you, presenting you with alternate realities⁷ that you may or may not choose privately or en masse, as you prefer.

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.