“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(There’s been a definite acceleration in Jane’s and my own psychic adventures lately. In fact, we’ve had trouble keeping up with our experiences, and little time to study them. I am sure of one thing: I’m in contact with my deceased parents in ways that I certainly didn’t employ while they were physical creatures. Nor did they in relation to me, of course. Yet certainly the use of such inner abilities — or at least an awareness of them — could greatly enhance communication between the members of a “living” family.)

First of all, in your terms “pure” identity has no form. You speak of one self within one body because you are only familiar with one portion of yourself. You suppose that all personhood in one way or another must have an equivalent of a human form, spiritual or otherwise, to “inhabit.”

(Pause.) In the same way, quite separate identities can merge with others in a give-and-take gestalt, in which the overall intent is as clear as the shape of the table. To some extent Joseph was perceiving that kind of inner psychic organization.

In your terms the earth at any given time represents the most exquisite physical, spiritual, and psychic cooperation, in which all consciousnesses are related and contribute to the overall reality. Physically, this is somewhat understood.

Give us a moment … (Then slowly:) It is difficult to explain on spiritual and psychic levels without speaking in terms of gradations of identity, for example, but in your terms even the smallest “particle” of identity is inviolate. It may grow, develop or expand, change alliances or organizations, and it does combine with others even as cells do. (Long pause.) Your body does not feel as if you invade it. Your consciousness and its consciousness are merged; yet it is composed of the multitudinous individual consciousnesses that form the tiniest physical particles within it. Those particles come and go, yet your body remains itself. What was physically a part of you last year is not today. Physically, you are a different person. Put simply, the stuff of the body is constantly returned to the earth,* where it forms again into physical actualization — but always differently.

(Long pause, eyes closed. Jane’s delivery had slowed considerably.) In somewhat the same way your identity changes constantly, even while you retain your sense of permanence. That sense of permanence rides upon endless changes — it is actually dependent upon those physical, spiritual, and psychic changes. In your terms, for example, if they did not occur constantly your body would die. The cells, again, are not simply minute, handy, unseen particles that happen to compose your organs. They also possess consciousnesses of their own. That [kind of] consciousness unites all physical matter.

(10:00.) Give us a moment … Cells compose natural forms. An identity is not a thing of a certain size or shape that must always appear in one given way. It is a unit of consciousness ever itself and inviolate while still free to form other organizations, enter other combinations in which all other units also decide to play a part. As there are different shapes to physical objects, then, so identity can take different shapes — and basically those forms are far more rich and diverse than the variety of physical objects.

(Long pause.) You speak about the chromosomes. Your scientists write about heredity, buried and coded in the genes,⁶ blueprints for an identity not yet formed. But there are psychic blueprints,⁷ so to speak, wherein each identity knows of its “history”; and taking any given line of development, projects that history. The potential of such an identity is far greater, however, than can ever be expressed through any physical one-line kind of development (forcefully).

You, as you think of yourself, may have trouble following such concepts, just as you would have trouble trying to follow the “future” reality of the cells within your body at this moment. (Long pause.) You must understand that in greater terms there is no big or small. There is not a giant identity and a pygmy one. Each identity is inviolate. Each also unites with others while maintaining its individuality and developing its own potential.

(Long pause.) Because a tree is physical, physical properties will be involved, and the seeds will mature following certain general principles or characteristics. Atoms and molecules will sometimes form trees; sometimes they will become parts of couches. They will form people or ants or blades of grass, yet in each of these ventures they will also retain their own sense of identity. They combine to form cells and organs, and through all of these events they obtain different kinds of experience.

Physically speaking, and generally, your body is composed of grasses and ants and rocks and beasts and birds, for in one way or another all biological matter is related.⁹ In certain terms, through your experience, birds and rocks speak alphabets — and certain portions of your own being fly or creep as birds or insects,¹⁰ forming the great gestalt of physical experience. It is fashionable to say: “You are what you eat” semicolon; that, for example, “You must not eat meat because you are killing the animals, and this is wrong.” But in deeper terms, physically and biologically, the animals are born from the body of the earth, which is composed of the corpses of men and women as much as it is of other matter. The animals consume you, then, as often as you consume them, and they are as much a part of your humanity as you are a part of their so called animal nature.

The constant interchange that exists biologically means that the same physical stuff that composes a man or a woman may be dispersed, and later form a toad, a starfish, a dog or a flower. It may be distributed into numberless different forms. That arithmetic¹¹ of consciousness is not annihilated. It is multiplied and not divided. Reminiscent within each form is the consciousness of all the other combinations, all of the other alliances, as identity continually forms new creative endeavors and gestalts of relatedness. There is no discrimination, no prejudice.

Through such strands of consciousness all of your world is related. Your own identity sends out strands of itself constantly, then. These mix psychically with other strands, as physically atoms and molecules are interchanged. So there are different organizations of identity in which you play a part.

3. Here Seth referred to his material in the 687th session for Volume 1. After 11:07: “I am saying that the individual self must become consciously aware of far more reality; that it must allow its recognition of identity to expand so that it includes previously unconscious knowledge. To do this you must understand, again, that man must move beyond the concepts of one god, one self, one body, one world, as these ideas are currently understood.”