“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Slowly and quietly:) Your present idea of identity is maintained only because you grant as valid such small aspects of your own reality.

Much of “Unknown” Reality is involved with the breaking up of theories that have been long accepted, but that prevent you from perceiving the powerful nature of those absent portions of the self. As you focus upon certain details from a larger field of physical reality, so then you focus upon only the small portion of yourself that you consider “real.”

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.

(Pause at 9:57.) Let those who will, laugh at tales of spirits turning into the trees⁵ — a simplistic theory, certainly, yet a symbolic statement in such societies: The dead were buried at home in the same close territory, to form in later times the very composition of the ground upon which religions grew. Again, your limited concepts of selfhood make what I am saying difficult for you to perceive.

These different lines of focus will each show you other aspects of your own reality, as individuals and as a species.

A third line supporting your selfhood as you think of it is the reincarnational one.⁹ This is somewhat like the ancestral line (long pause), and there are also reflections in the genes and chromosomes undetected by your scientists. The ancestral and reincarnational lines merge to some extent to form what you think of as your genetic patterns ahead of time, so to speak. Before this life you chose what you wished from those two main areas.

You cannot say that your ancestors, like some strange plants, were growing toward what you are, or that you are the sum of their experiences. They were, they are, themselves. You cannot say that you are the sum of your past reincarnational lives either, and for the same reasons. You cut off the knowledge of yourself, and so divisions seem to occur. You are somewhat like a plant that recognizes only one of its leaves at a time. A leaf feels its deeper reality as a part of the plant, and adds to its own sense of continuity, and even to its own sense of individuality. But you often pretend that you are some odd dangling leaf, with no roots, growing without a plant to support you.

Such knowledge, however, would automatically affect those past lives. Ideas of cause and effect can hold you back here, because it seems to you that the leaves of next year come as an effect caused by this year’s leaves.¹⁰ To the plant and its innate creative pattern, however, all of its manifestations are one — an expression of itself, each portion different. The knowledge of its “future” leaves, as potential pattern, exists now. The same applies to the psyche. In that greater realm of reality there is creative interplay, and interrelationships between all aspects of selfhood.

1. As defined in Note 9 for Session 682, in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality: “Chromosomes are microscopic bodies into which the protoplasmic substance of a cell nucleus separates during cell division. They carry the genes, the factors or units — ‘blueprints’ — that determine hereditary characteristics.”

7. Seth evidently referred to the material he gave on the conscious attributes of information for Chapter 3 of Personal Reality. Note 1 for Session 697, in Volume 1, contains quotations from those comments, as well as a few other references.

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.”