“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.

(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.