“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In other words, your accepted concepts of selfhood would disappear if you ever allowed any significant subjective experience to intrude. “The Absent Self” — the absent or unknown self — is the portion of your own existence that you do not ordinarily perceive or accept, though there is within you a longing for it.

Give us a moment … Selfhood overspills with great luxurious outcroppings, yet you jealously guard against such creativity. To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes,¹ which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible — one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before. As Ruburt recently suspected, some very old cultures have been aware of this.² Period. While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods. This does not mean that the individual self was less, but was more aware of its own reality. A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

Give us a moment … The information carried by the chromosomes is not general, but highly specific. It is codified data (itself alive) that contains within it the essence of ancestral knowledge — change that to ancestral experience — of specific ancestral experience. Biologically you do indeed carry within you, then, the memories of your particular ancestors. These form a partial basis for your subjective and physical existence, and provide the needed support for it.

There is a constant interaction in the plant, between its parts, that you do not perceive. The leaves now present are biologically valid, interrelating in your terms. Yet in time terms each leaf is also aware of the past history of the plant, and biologically they spring up from that “past.”

Selves (spelled) have far greater freedom than leaves, but they can also root themselves if they choose — and they do. Reincarnational selves are like leaves that have left the plant, choosing a new medium of existence. In this analogy, the dropped leaves of the physical plant have fulfilled their own purposes to themselves as leaves, and to the plant. These selves, however, dropping from one branch of time, root themselves in another time and become new plants from which others will sprout.

(“Do you mean ‘new selves’ instead of ‘new plants’?”)

10. Besides quoting from the 18th session in Note 7, above, I presented excepts on tree consciousness from the same session in Note 7 for Session 727. Let me briefly continue that early Seth material here: “In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said (in the 16th session) that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was, therefore, a natural law of the universe. Not only do these so-called laws, which are not laws, vary according to where you are in the universe, they also vary according to what you are in the universe. Therefore, your tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. To a tree the laws are simply different. And if a tree wrote its laws of the universe, then you would know how different they are.”