“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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 soul is not a unit that is definable. It is instead an undefinable quality. It cannot be broken down or built up, destroyed or expanded, yet it can change affiliation and organization, and its characteristics, while ever remaining itself.

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.”)

On a more personal level, Jane herself naturally aborted a three-month-old fetus, less than a year after our marriage in 1954 (and nine years before she initiated these sessions). Seth has said very little about this event, nor have we asked him to. He did remark some time ago in a private session that the miscarriage spontaneously came about because the personality inhabiting the fetus “changed its mind,” and withdrew from the physical world. At some indefinite date we do plan to invite Seth to discuss the whole situation in detail.