“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(10:31. Jane was out of her very excellent trance at once. “That was one of those times when the material was coming through so great that I could have continued until morning. That feeling of freedom is fantastic,” she said, then tried an analogy: “I’m as free as a great runner who breaks a world record when her chest hits the tape….”

(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.

(As break neared its end, Jane said that Seth was going to give the material available through one of the other channels open from him tonight. This decision was strictly her own, of course, and was motivated by a very successful out-of-body experience she’d had last night, following ESP class. Jane was especially happy that today she had found interesting correlations with part of her adventure through a friend [Mary] who is also a class member.

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.

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.”)

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.