“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent, we have discussed your body and its composition of cells (in the 632nd session in Chapter Seven, for instance). All of the cells that now make up your physical form obviously exist at once. Imagine that you have many lives enduring in the same fashion. Instead of cells then you have selves. I told you that each cell has its own memory. The self-memory is, of course, of far greater dimension.

Think of the greater you — call it the entity if you want to — as forming a psychic structure quite as real as your physical one, but composed of many selves. As each cell of your body has its position within your corporeal space and boundaries, so each self within the entity is aware of its own “time” and dimension of activity. The body is a temporal structure. The cells, however, while a part of this body, are not aware of the entire dimension in which your consciousness dwells. They do not perceive all of the elements that are available even in three-dimensional experience, yet your present consciousness — seemingly so much more sophisticated — physically rests upon cellular awareness.

Remember also, in your terms now, the great gulf that separates you as a self from those cells that physically compose you. Your own present identity contains the knowledge and “memory” of all those simultaneous existences, even as the cells in their way retain memory of all those physical structures which they (have) formed. Consciously, because of your time concepts, you will interpret those simultaneous lives in reincarnational terms, one seemingly before the other.

The cells do not have free will in your terms. They have the innate capacity to form other organizations, but not while affiliated with you. To leave you they must change their form. To some extent you determine their “good health” within the framework of their nature. They also help maintain yours. (Pause.) In terms of consciousness, the entity or greater you knows as much more than you know, as you know more than your cells.

[...] Think of them now as living electromagnetic cells, differing from the physical cells in your body only in the nature of their materialization. Your thoughts direct the overall functioning of your body’s cells, even though you do not consciously know how those cells operate. [...]

Each physical cell is in its way a miniature brain, with memory of all of its personal experiences and of its relationship with other cells, and with the body as a whole. In your terms this means that each cell operates with an innate picture of the body’s entire history — past, present, and future.

[...] The cells within your hand contain within themselves memories your conscious mind would be dazzled to behold. Yet remember that the cells in your twenty-seven-year-old hand are in no physical way the same cells that experienced any of those events. [...]

For now, dictation: As most of you know, the atoms that compose your cells, as well as the cells themselves, constantly die and are replaced. [...]

[...] You can cause a cell, or a group of cells, to change their self-image, for example; and again, you do this often — as you healed yourselves of diseases because of your intent to become well. [...] In such a case, however, the self-healing qualities of the cells are reinforced, and the self-healing abilities of the species are also strengthened.

[...] You know this because you have a reasoning mind, but that particular kind of reasoning mind knows what it knows because at deep levels the cells are aware of the nature of probable action. [...] The conscious intent, therefore, activates the inner mechanisms and changes the behavior of the cells and their components.

(Earlier this evening I reminded Jane of the conversation about cells, versus their components, that we’d had because of Seth’s material at 9:38 in Session 705. [...]

Dictation … The cells of course are changing. [...]

[...] Yet in the physical framework there is a constant intermixing, so that the cells of a man or a woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal,⁴ and of course vice versa. The cells that have been a part of a human brain know this in their way. Those cells that now compose your own bodies have combined and discombined many times to form other portions of the natural environment.

4. Jane and I understand Seth’s point when he tells us that “the cells of a man or woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal.” However, for the reasons given in Note 3 for Session 687, in Volume 1, we’d rather think of the molecular components of cells as participating in the structures of a variety of forms. (And I can note a week later that at the end of Session 707, Seth makes his own comment about cells surviving changes of form.)

[...] Your emotional intent and your belief will direct the functioning of your cells and (emphatically) bring out in them those properties and inherent abilities that will ensure such a condition. [...] There is an inexhaustible creativity within the cells themselves, that you are not using as a species because your beliefs lag so far behind your innate biological spirituality and wisdom. [...]

[...] The cells have inner capabilities that you have not discovered. [...]

Thoughts have their own kind of structure, as cells do, and they seek their own fulfillment. [...] Each cell in your body is to some extent altered with each thought that you think. Each reaction of the cells alters your environment. [...] As the cells respond at certain levels to ever-changing streams of probabilities, so do your thoughts. [...]

[...] Biologically, in your terms, such “brotherhood” operates instinctively in the cooperation of the body’s cells, as they function together to form the private corporal structure. At your viewpoint you lose appreciation for the great individuality of each cell. You take it for granted that because the cells work so well together, they have no private uniqueness.

[...] In certain terms they become the cell’s private “idea” of its own growth and development, a picture alive within the cell in terms of physical information, a part of its structure. [...]

In other terms, however — social terms — you have yet to achieve the same kind of spiritual brotherhood possessed by your cells; and so you do not understand that the experience of your world is intimately connected with your own private experience. [...]

Consciousness ejects signals, the consciousness within the cell, not the cell, you see. Now the consciousness is within the cell, all through the cell, not localized within it, and yet it is not the matter of the cell.

[...] Each cell, as I told you, is aware. [...]

[...] (Last summer, Jane found an injured bird, and for several days tried to make it live.) When the personality understands, it can indeed then will itself to leave the body in an aware state, and as it goes bless the body consciousness who has served it so well, release the tiny birdlike awareness within each cell, and go on to its own transition.

[...] You read a theory to the effect that cells ejected signals as they died.

The cell is individual, and struggles for rightful survival. Yet its time is limited, and the body’s survival is dependent upon the cell’s innate wisdom: The cell must die finally for the body to survive, and only by dying can the cell further its own development, and therefore insure its own greater survival. So the cell knows that to die is to live.

[...] Here cells die and are replaced. Knowing their own indestructibility, the CU’s within them simply change form, retaining however the identity of all the cells that they have been. (Intently:) While the cell dies physically, its inviolate nature is not betrayed. [...]

Now: This means that biologically the cell is aware of all of its probable variations, while in your time and structures it holds its unique position as a part, say, of any given organ in your body. (Pause.) In greater terms the cell is a huge physical universe, orbiting an invisible CU; and in your terms the CU will always be invisible — beyond the smallest phenomenon that you can perceive with any kind of instrument. [...]

Give us a moment … In the body certain cells “kill” others, and in so doing the body’s living integrity is maintained. The cells do each other that service (with gestures). [...]

All the cells in the body are individual, and have a separate consciousness. There are certainly gradations here, but the fact remains that every cell is a conscious cell. There is conscious cooperation between the cells in all the organs, and between all the organs themselves.

[...] They form into cells. Now, although the cells maintain individuality and do not lose any of their abilities, in this formation into cells there is actually a pooling of individual consciousness of atoms and molecules into, and to form, an individual cellular consciousness. [...]

The atoms and molecules that make up all physical cells are not basically bound by your time. [...]

[...] You end up with organs composed of literally unnumbered individual cells, in which case the same combination with its resulting benefits for the individual, also results in the formation of a larger consciousness.

The CU’s, forming the structure later in its entirety, form all the atoms, molecules, cells, and organs that make up your world. [...] Such biological precognition is firmly based in the chromosomes and genes, and reflected in the cells. As mentioned earlier (in the 684tb session), the present corporal structure of any physical body of any kind is maintained only because of the cells’ innate precognitive abilities. [...] The cells’ practically felt “Now” includes, then, what you would think of as past and future, as simple conditions of Nowness. [...] There is a constant give-and-take of communication between the cell as you know it in present time, and the cell as it “was” in the past, or “will be.”

The cell’s comprehension leaps its present form. The reality, the physical reality of a given cell, is the focused result of its existence before and after itself in time; and from its knowledge of past and future it receives its present structure.

[...] Your thoughts and feelings are quite as real as your cells. [...]

[...] They will serve as biological patterns to the cells, as well as psychic stimuli in terms of consciousness.

I have told you that the very cells of the body are aware of the conditions in the environment, of other cells, and of course of the creatures within the environment. [...]

Your body cells knew at the same time that your friend was in some difficulty, and wanted help. The cells in Leonard’s body—in a manner of speaking—sent out a message for help (pause), “radiated” outward for a receiver. [...]

Now: Had you been following your natural impulses, your body cells would have picked up that message easily. [...]

[...] It means that the cells send out messages of exaltation and happiness as well as distress, and that you react to these in various fashions at different times, according to the conditions. [...]

I have mentioned also that the cells in an arm could just as well have been formed into the cells of another limb or portion of the body. [...] There is a difference between the physical chromosome pattern, and the mental gene code, in that the chromosomes carry translated inner instructions in condensed physical form, for the physical cells to follow.

I spoke in our last session of the cooperation existing between the cells of the body, and of the cooperation existing between the atoms and molecules that make up the cells and organs.

[...] I mentioned how the atoms and molecules combine to form cells, while each individual atom and molecule does not give up its own uniqueness, but forms rather a gestalt, so that a cell is indeed a psychic gestalt given physical construction through the capacity that exists within each individual component.

[...] It is extremely important that you understand this fact, and realize that the individual cells, for example, lose no individuality in this process, and gain immeasurably, the whole physical structure of the body being the result of this cooperation of cells which are themselves the result of the cooperation of atoms and molecules.

It is not simply that a cell suddenly “relaxes its defenses” against disease. [...] A cell mirrors a psychological state. A cell exists by itself, as its own entity, but also in context with all of the other cells in the body. [...]

Though scientists might find “cancer cells,” and though it might seem that cancer is caused by a virus, cancer instead involves a relationship, say, between what you might think of as a host and parasite, in those terms — and to some extent the same applies to any disease, including smallpox, though the diseases themselves may appear to have different causes completely. A host cell, say, is not simply attacked. [...]

[...] The cells know this. [...] Many do: The psychological condition changes for the better, and the body cells are no longer amiable to the cancerous condition.

In the case of your article, a woman’s cells would already have had to prepare themselves for the guest — granted that guest was cancerous, and was a sperm. [...]

Actually, through the generic system each cell possesses capsule comprehension, (pause) that is a certain kind of visualizing, and an emotional charge. Before cellular specialization occurred each cell could combine with another indiscriminately. What are now your five senses were once sense mechanisms or possibilities, existing through the entire surface of any individual cell.

[...] The individual cells are the first animals possessing innate awareness of their environment with rudimentary sense mechanisms, to your way of thinking.

They are composites, built up by the cells, and held in a suspended memory. [...]

[...] The invisible reality within the cell is what gives it its structure. The remarkable organization of the body in terms of its learning abilities, and adaptability, will never be understood unless the cells’ precognitive comprehension is taken into consideration.¹

[...] With all of their dire faults and distortions, religions have at least kept alive the idea of unseen, valid worlds, and given some affirmation to concepts that are literally known by the cells. [...]

The conscious mind has always been aware of the cells’ —

This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greatest fulfillment — the idea of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. [...]

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. [...]

[...] Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.” [...]

You carry within you, however, the deep knowledge of experience that in your terms would be prior, yet in your cells and your own deeper mind such information is current.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] For as you think of the matter of your cells as only matter, then it is hard to follow our analogy. But when you realize that your own body cells are much more than physical, contain their own capsule comprehension, then you will see that they could, at least theoretically, operate in such a manner if you could throw your own consciousness into them, and perceive their seemingly alien experience.

[...] On one hand they are a part of the entity, as your cells are a portion of your body. [...]

It is as if you could consciously come to terms with each of your own cells and become aware, in your terms, of their future and their past. [...]

[...] It is as if the nuclei of a cell could travel through itself. [...]

It is impossible for you to examine an atom, a cell, or anything else except in your now. [...] Because your sense experience follows a time pattern that you can understand, then you take it for granted that a cell, for example, is the result of its past, and that its present condition arises from the past.⁴ The fetus grows into an adult, not because it is programmed from the past, but because it is to some extent precognitively aware of its probabilities, and from the “future” then imprints this information into the past structure.

[...] The cells precognate. [...]

From your viewpoint, however, an examination of a cell will not show you that, but only its present condition. [...]

(A one-minute pause at 11:22.) Such behavior even causes a certain corporal dishonesty, for the cells’ freedom from time means that on certain levels the cellular structure is aware of probable future events, as mentioned (just before break). The body, therefore, is reacting to future and past activity as well, in order to maintain its present corporal balance.

[...] They compose the cells, and these combine to form the organs. The organs possess the combined consciousnesses of each of the cells within them, and in their way the organs sense their own identity.

[...] The life of its atoms and molecules and cells is translated into other living natural forms. [...]

[...] Of course the fetus “has a soul” — but in the same way, if you think in those terms, then each cell within the fetus must be granted a soul (leaning forward with humorous emphasis, voice deeper). The course of a cell is not predetermined. Cells are usually very cooperative, particularly as they form the structures of the body.³

[...] 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. [...] 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. [...]

[...] In fulfilling themselves the cells aid your own existence, but in a framework they have chosen. [...]

The cells are not inferior as far as you are concerned, even though they form part of the structure of your physical being. [...]

[...] The “nucleus”—now using a cell analogy—if these units were cells, which they are not, then it would be as if the nucleus were constantly changing position, flying off in all directions, dragging the rest of the cell along with it. [...]

The units obviously are within the reality of all cells. Now: the initiation point is the basic part of the unit, as the nucleus is the important part of the cell. [...]