“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.

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.

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.

Now dolphins deal with an entirely different dimension of reality. There is as yet no method of communication that can allow you to perceive their concepts of selfhood, or their [collective] vision of existence. They are sensitive, self-aware individuals. They are altruistic. They understand the nature of relativity,⁶ and they have different ways of passing on information to their young. They are not higher or lower than your own species. They simply represent a different kind of selfhood.

Now there is some relationship, at least in terms of our discussion, between the reality of the dolphins and the reality of the fetus. In your terms the fetus lives in primeval conditions, reminiscent of periods in the species’ past. It relates in its own way to its environment. Now for some consciousnesses this is sufficient. In your terms, again, for each of you, it was sufficient.

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.