“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.

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).

Water rushes down the hillside into the valley, and there is a constant give-and-take between the village below, say, or the meadows, and the mountain. So there is the same kind of transformation, change, and cooperation between all identities. You can draw the lines where you will for convenience’s sake, but each identity retains its individuality and inviolate nature even while it constantly changes.

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.

“What selves do you encounter in time? And what makes you think that those selves exist in time as you understand it only? Why does it seem impossible that other strands of consciousness go to you and out from you constantly?”

13. But added a few weeks later: The idea, adopted so enthusiastically by so many class members, didn’t work out after all. Jane and I came to realize that even her students tired of the unending process of writing letters (even about subjects they’re interested in) week after week. “It turned into too much work,” more than one student ruefully admitted. For the flow of letters is constant. Nor, we learned, did some of those who wrote Jane relish receiving a reply from someone else. The result of the experiment was that once more we were thrown back upon our own resources. We do what we can. Our latest attempts to handle the mail are described in the final passages of my Introductory Notes for Volume 1. Seth’s most recent letter to correspondents is presented at the conclusion of those notes.