“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Intently at 9:36:) Now this does not mean that your personality as you know it was often trapped within a womb, destined to die there, or that a hypothetical whole self would not be born. It means that the archaeology of your psyche as it is physically focused carries those experiences. The self is not … (pause, eyes closed) … give us a moment; I am searching for a good analogy … the self is not like a clay figure coming from a potter’s oven, so that you can say: “Ah, here is a self, and nothing can be added to it.” You have always existed as a probable self, though you were not focused in the knowledge of your own experience.

(In parentheses: You may have been focused quite well in other realities, but I am speaking of your earthly existence as you understand it.)

To a certain extent what you are was latent in the fetus, but there is no one point when “the full awareness of the soul enters into the flesh.” The process is gradual. In physical terms it begins before your own parents are born.

In your terms, the person at birth is affected by multidimensional conditions, and the collective position of the planets is but one very minute indication of the other realities involved. Ruburt is correct: Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality, as well [as that of birth]. Your focus of attention forms boundaries that predispose you to believe in a point at which your consciousness emerges, as you understand it, and a point when it is no longer effective, or dies. Your beliefs in such concepts limit your perception, for by altering the focus of your attention you can to some extent become aware of perception before and after the recognized points of birth and death.

You grant soulhood only to your own species, as if souls had sizes that fit your own natures only. You preserve these ideas by thinking of animals as beneath you. Then, however, you must wonder when the soul enters the flesh, or when the alien fetus becomes one of your own, and therefore blessed by the gods and granted the right to life.

(10:02.) Give us a moment … But the body is a context that they have chosen to experience. In fulfilling themselves the cells aid your own existence, but in a framework they have chosen. They can reject certain elements within their existences, however, change their courses or even form new alliances. They have great freedom within what you think of as the framework of your reality. If their paths cannot be charted, and can indeed constantly surprise you, then why do you think that your course can be mapped out ahead of time by reading the positions of the stars at your birth?

The cells are not inferior as far as you are concerned, even though they form part of the structure of your physical being. They are not even less conscious. (Emphatically:) They are conscious in a different fashion. There is no need to “romanticize” them, or to think of them as little people, but each of them possesses a highly focused consciousness, and a consciousness of self. You like to think — again — that only your own species possesses an awareness of its own selfhood. There are different kinds of selfhood, and an infinite variety of ways to experience self-awareness.

(With much animation:) As an example, it appears to you that animals do not reflect upon their own reality. Certainly it seems that a cell has no “objective” knowledge of its own being, colon: as if it is without knowing what it is, or without appreciation of its own isness. You are quite wrong in such deductions. Nor are there necessarily gradations in which one kind of consciousness progresses in rigid terms from a lower to a higher state. Any cell has practical use of precognitive abilities,⁴ for example, that quite escape you, yet many of you assign such abilities to “higher” souls. Each kind of life has its own qualities that cannot be compared with those of others, and that often cannot be communicated.

Now: All of this may seem to have little to do with the nature of reincarnation, as you think of it, or with counterparts as I have explained them. Yet it is vital that you throw aside old concepts of the self and of the soul before you can begin to understand the freedom of your own selfhood.

Now dolphins deal with an entirely different dimension of reality. There is as yet no method of communication that can allow you to perceive their concepts of selfhood, or their [collective] vision of existence. They are sensitive, self-aware individuals. They are altruistic. They understand the nature of relativity,⁶ and they have different ways of passing on information to their young. They are not higher or lower than your own species. They simply represent a different kind of selfhood.

Now there is some relationship, at least in terms of our discussion, between the reality of the dolphins and the reality of the fetus. In your terms the fetus lives in primeval conditions, reminiscent of periods in the species’ past. It relates in its own way to its environment. Now for some consciousnesses this is sufficient. In your terms, again, for each of you, it was sufficient.

The soul within the fetus cannot be destroyed by any kind of abortion, for instance. Its progress cannot be charted, for it will always escape such calculations. Its history is in the future, which always creates the past.

(Not only that: Jane now had several other channels of data available from Seth. “God, I get impatient!” she exclaimed “But in physical reality I can get only one of them at a time, and you can write just one sentence at a time.⁷ Oh, forget it, Seth,” she added, half laughing, for that “energy personality essence” was ready with comments on what she’d just told me. Jane got up and walked around the living room, where we were holding the session. When she went into the kitchen she picked up more from Seth on astrology.

(As break neared its end, Jane said that Seth was going to give the material available through one of the other channels open from him tonight. This decision was strictly her own, of course, and was motivated by a very successful out-of-body experience she’d had last night, following ESP class. Jane was especially happy that today she had found interesting correlations with part of her adventure through a friend [Mary] who is also a class member.

1. Appendix 12 contains much material on conventional theories of evolution, as well as on Seth’s and my own often countering views.

I think it very likely that aborted fetuses and those infants who die early in “life” — say within a few months after birth, especially — never intended to stay long within camouflage (physical) reality to begin with; the consciousnesses within those small human structures came just to momentarily sample our world of matter, whether from inside the womb or out of it. Considering their viewpoints, it’s not tragic that they “die” unborn, or at such young ages, although in ordinary terms the parents involved will almost certainly mourn deeply. (Perhaps these notions will be of some limited comfort to those who have written us with related questions.)

But for such consciousnesses the bulk of their activities will be elsewhere, possibly in other probable realities, possibly in nonphysical realities that we can hardly imagine from our own vantage points. Those who die unborn, or young, choose to touch upon physical reality to fulfill certain needs; they glimpse it as one might a view through the window of a passing automobile. I really believe that those “certain needs” can have vast implications, by the way, but this isn’t the place to attempt a discussion of such aspects of reality.

Of course, these ideas would apply to any form of life as we ordinarily think of that quality. They would be a commonplace in the animal world, for instance; witness the quick deaths of certain newborn kittens in a litter (as Jane and I have); or consider the puppy in an animal shelter, or pound, certain to be put to death in a few days if no one gives it a home. The young dog won’t live long, yet I think that in its own way it must understand that great “risk”; for specific reasons its consciousness decided upon its brief look into temporal reality. (This kind of thinking usually reminds me of a certain statement Seth made half a dozen years ago; see Note 7 for Session 727: “Creatures without the compartment of the ego can easily follow their own identity beyond any change of form.”)

5. The superior intellectual and altruistic characteristics of dolphins and other cetaceans are well known, if barely understood in detail. Seth commented on dolphins some 10 months ago in his final delivery for the 688th session in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality; he cited them as being not only similar to certain species that had lived on our own planet in the far past, but as representing bleed-throughs from probable realities in which water-dwelling mammals predominate.

6. I’d say that in a context like the one he uses here, Seth automatically refers to Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Within the overriding constancy of the speed of light, all phenomena in our camouflage reality — motion, velocity, mass, matter, time, space, gravitation, and so forth — are seen as relative to each other. Space and time, for instance, are not separate or uniform entities, but closely related intuitive “constructs” of consciousness; mass is a form of energy; motion is not absolute, but relative to the motion of something else; two observers, each moving at a different velocity relative to a common sequence of events, will perceive those events in different courses of time.

According to Seth, then, in its own way the dolphin (and the whale, of course) grasps such phenomena — and without the aid of the very sophisticated written calculations and the physical instruments we humans use.

7. Jane first experienced the multiple-channel effect with Seth not long after she began delivering Personal Reality; see Session 616 for Chapter 2.

8. I can add later that in Chapter 17 of Psychic Politics Jane presented both her own notes on her out-of-body experience, and the material Seth gave on it the next evening in the 730th session.