“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

There is indeed a communication existing that joins all of nature, an inner webwork, so that each part of the earth knows what its other parts are doing. Cells are organizations, ever-changing, forming and unforming.

(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.

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.

Your thinking mind, as you consider it, is the top of your mountain. In certain terms you can see “more” than your cells can, though they are also conscious of their realities. Were it not for their lives you would not be at the top of your psychological mountain. Even the trees at the highest tip of the hillside send sturdy roots into the ground, and receive from it nourishment and vitality — and there is a great give-and-take between the smallest sapling in the foothills and the most ancient pine. No single blade of grass dies but that it affects the entire mountain. The energy within the grass sinks into the earth, and in your terms is again reborn. Trees, rocks, and grass constantly exchange places as energy changes form (very forcefully, leaning forward, eyes wide and dark).

(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.

When you eat, you must eliminate through your bowels. That resulting matter eventually returns to the earth, where it helps form all other living things. The “dead” matter — the residue of a bird, the sloughed-off cells — these things are not then used by other birds (though they may be occasionally), but by men and women. There is no rule that says your discarded cellular material can be used only by your own species. Yet in your terms any identity, no matter how “minute,” retains itself and its identity through many forms and alliances of organizations.

To every cell my thoughts leap through