“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.”)