“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In, I repeat, conventional ideas of evolution,¹ this would be a period in which your kind of consciousness experimented with a water environment, with fins instead of lungs. In certain terms this gives the consciousness a look at particular portions of the species’ “past.” It also provides that consciousness with firsthand knowledge psychically and directly. Again — most difficult to explain (exclamation point)! Particularly without offending your ideas of selfhood — yet each of you “alive” died in just such a manner.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Seth’s discussion in this evening’s (730th) session also reminded me of an article I’d clipped from a metropolitan newspaper in 1974. The gist of the piece is that each year in this country an estimated several thousand seriously defective infants are quietly left to die, without treatment, after most careful consideration by the parents and doctors involved.