“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we sat waiting for the session at 8:50 Jane felt a little nervous; she often does after a layoff from book dictation. But she laughed, as she has before in such cases: “I just want to get it — the beginning — over with.” At 8:55, moving closer to that familiar dissociated state, approaching that psychological bridge which serves as a common meeting ground for Seth and herself she announced that she felt “a rather generalized idea of what Seth will say on the book stuff.” Less clear were some data about herself but she thought Seth would cover all of that along with his material on “Unknown” Reality. “I guess we’ll start out with the book….”

The body is equipped, ideally again now, to rid itself of any diseases, and to maintain its stability into what you would call advanced old age, with only a gradual overall change. At its best, however, the change would bring about spiritual alterations. When you leave for a vacation, for example, you close down your house. In these ideal terms, death would involve a closing down of your [physical] house; it would not be crumbling about you.

(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.

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.

(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 the physical organism as such is capable of that kind of reality system. It is not better or worse than your own. It is simply alternate behavior, biologically and spiritually possible. No complicated physical transportation systems were set up. In the physical state, in what you would call the waking state, these individuals slept. To you, comparatively speaking, their waking activities would seem dreamlike, and yet they behaved with great natural physical grace, allowing the body to function to capacity. They did not saddle it with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. Such bodies did not age to the extent now, that yours do, and enjoyed the greatest ease and sense of belonging with the environment.

(10:24.) Consciousness connected with the flesh, then, has great leeway spiritually and biologically, and can focus itself in many ways with and through the flesh, beside your own particular orientation. There have been highly sophisticated, developed civilizations that would not be apparent to you because the main orientation was mental or psychic, while the physical race itself would seem to be highly undeveloped.

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.

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.”

(Pause at 10:43, during a strong delivery.) Here consciousness decides to leave the flesh, to accept an official¹⁴ death. You have already chosen a context however, and it seems that that context is inevitable. It appears, then, that the body will last so long and no longer. The fact remains that you have chosen the kind of consciousness that identifies with the flesh for a certain period of time. Other species of consciousness — of a different order entirely, and with a different rhythm of experience — would think of a life in your terms as a day, and have no trouble bridging that gap between apparent life, death, and new life.

(11:00. Jane’s trance had been excellent. She vaguely remembered that Seth had talked about “sleepwalkers.” I described the material briefly, then added, “It would be a joke if that information applied to our own ancestors, our cavemen, as we think of them.” Whereupon Jane said she thought it did at one level, but she didn’t elaborate.

To other portions of yourself you would seem to be a sleepwalker. Full creative participation in any moment, however, awakens you to your own potentials, and therefore allows you to experience a unity between your own consciousness and the comprehension of your physical cells. Those cells are as spiritual as your soul is.

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 …