“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The animals were also accepted in this natural philosophy of selfhood as the individual plainly saw the living quality of consciousness. The characteristics of the animals were understood to continue “life,” adding their qualities to the experience of the self in a new way.³ You had better put “life” in quotes in that last sentence.

(Pause.) The human body would be used in earth’s great husbandry as, from it, dying and decaying new forms would arise. This was a give-and-take in which, for instance, a jungle neighborhood was truly home, and all was a portion of the self psychically, spiritually, and physically.⁴

All of the leaves now growing on this plant could be thought of as counterparts of each other, each alive and individual in one time, each contributing yet facing in different directions. As one leaf falls another takes its place, until next year the whole plant, still living, will have a completely new set of leaves — future reincarnational selves of this batch.

(Long pause.) The plant has its own “idea” of itself, in which each of its leaves has its part. Yet each leaf has the latent capacities of the whole plant. Root one, for instance, and a new plant will grow.

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’?”)