“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we lay in bed after last Monday’s session, Jane told me: “I’ve got it — from Seth, I think: A really complete astrological chart would have to include not only the time of your birth, but that of your death.” Which would pose a few obstacles, I thought as I fell asleep. …

The physical self as you know it is a focus of consciousness that forms a personality in response to that focus. It is very difficult to make analogies here, but I am foolhardy enough to try it. (Pause.) It seems to you that any naturally aborted fetus has no physical life at all, that such life has been denied to it for some reason. Instead, the fetus experiences another level: physical life at a different scale, that in your terms would apply to the distant past.

While in conventional terms you think of long centuries’ duration, in which finned creatures rose from the seas, some “becoming” reptiles and finally mammals, many did not make that journey but “fell” along the way. So in those terms, and following that analogy, the psyche makes the same kind of adjustments and life-changes. You have each existed many times, then, as fetuses “who did not make it.” Not necessarily because you did not want to be born, but because those experiences were in themselves legitimate,² and in your present state are written in the “memory” of your physical being.

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

At any point now you can literally become more yourself. In that regard, you are born by degrees. In certain terms you have discarded portions of yourself, so you died by degrees — but the two, the living and the dying, occur at once.

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.

Give us a moment. (Long pause.) The chart of events at the time of your “birth” is like one small snapshot of someone’s backyard in the afternoon. Here in this analogy, the entire earthly personality could be compared to the world. Now as long as you make your deductions according to that one picture, there will be correlations that apply — but only to that small specific area.

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.

But all things have consciousness, and in those terms possess a soul-nature. There are no gradations as to soul. Soul is the life within everything that is. Of course the fetus “has a soul” — but in the same way, if you think in those terms, then each cell within the fetus must be granted a soul (leaning forward with humorous emphasis, voice deeper). The course of a cell is not predetermined. Cells are usually very cooperative, particularly as they form the structures of the body.³

(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.

(10:18. “No” Actually I was, but Jane was doing so well as Seth that I hated to interrupt her delivery of the material.)

(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.

(Returning at 10:54, then, Seth not only came through with the material Jane wanted,^,8 but devoted considerable time to some other information for her. He ended the session at 11:45 P.M.)

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.

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.