“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A simple tree deals with the nature of probabilities as it thrusts forward into new seeds. Computations go on constantly within it, and that communication involves an inner kind of language innocent of symbols and vowels. The tree knows its present and future history,⁷ in your terms, but it understands a future that is not preordained. It feels its own power in the present as it constructs that future. In deeper terms the tree’s seeds also realize that there is a future there — a variety of futures toward which they grope.

7. Seth’s material on trees reminded me of his 18th session for January 22, 1964. It made a lasting impression upon me. It’s full of evocative statements that were new to us at the time, since the sessions were barely underway: “As to Jane’s feeling about trees having [a certain kind of] consciousness, of course this is the case … The tree is dissociated in one manner. It is in a state of drowsiness on the one hand, and on the other it focuses the usable portion of its energy into being a tree.

“… the inner senses of the tree have a strong affinity with the properties of the earth itself. They feel their growing, as you listen to your heartbeat … They also experience pain [which] while definite, unpleasant, and sometimes agonizing, is not of an emotional nature in the same way that you might feel pain. It is as if your breath were to be suddenly cut off.

“A tree knows human beings also … by the vibrations in the air as they pass, which hit the tree’s trunk from varying distances, and even by such things as voices. The tree does not build up an image of man, but a composite sensation which represents an individual. And the same tree will recognize the same person who passes it by each day….”

The Trees in the Forest

The trees in the forest

One might say that Seth continued his own tree data almost five years later, in the 453rd session for December 4, 1968. Jane presented that rather brief session in full in the Appendix for The Seth Material, but from it I’d like to quote these lines:

“To your way of thinking, some lives are lived in a twinkling (in various systems), and others last for centuries. The perception of consciousness is not limited, however. I have told you, for example, that trees have their own consciousness. The consciousness of a tree is not as specifically focused as your own, yet to all intents and purposes, the tree is conscious of 50 years before its existence, and 50 years hence. Its sense of identity spontaneously goes beyond the change of its own form. It has no ego to cut the ‘I’ identification short. Creatures without the compartment of the ego can easily follow their own identity beyond any change of form.”