[...] The perception of consciousness is not limited, however. I have told you, for example, that trees have their own consciousness. The consciousness of a tree is not as specifically focused as your own, yet to all intents and purposes, the tree is conscious of 50 years before its existence, and 50 years hence. [...]

As all physical matter is connected in any particular time, or era, so the individual consciousness of each being is also connected with every other. This applies to all consciousnesses as you understand that term.

Each flower on a hillside looks out with its own unique vision of the world, and each consciousness does the same thing, fulfilling a position impossible for any other consciousness to fulfill.

REINCARNATION AND COUNTERPARTS: THE “PAST” SEEN THROUGH THE MOSAICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

[...] The perception of consciousness is not limited, however. I have told you, for example, that trees have their own consciousness. The consciousness of a tree is not as specifically focused as your own, yet to all intents and purposes, the tree is conscious of fifty years before its existence, and fifty years hence.

[...] As your own universe was formed by entities that you do not presently understand, so the discards of your own consciousness form realities for entities that are scarcely aware of your existence.

[...] You are not at the top nor at the bottom of the heap of consciousness, so to speak. [...]

Any consciousness is, therefore, innately aware of its basic identity. [...]

I have used the term “expansion of consciousness” here rather than the more frequently used “cosmic consciousness” (pause), because the latter implies an experience of proportions not available to mankind at this time. (Pause.) Intense expansions of consciousness by contrast to your normal state may appear to be cosmic in nature, but they barely hint at those possibilities of consciousness that are available to you now, much less begin to approach a true cosmic awareness.

Above all, individuals who receive such information in states of expanded consciousness are already those who feel deeply within themselves connections not only with the earth itself, but with deeper realities. Consciously they may often be unaware of this basic quality within themselves. [...]

[...] His consciousness left his body only after he was in the throes of what seemed to him to be inspiration of almost unbearable intensity. [...]

[...] The individual now realizes that he is indeed a living web of reality, and this becomes immediate conscious knowledge.

The categories [healing, teaching, or whatever] are general descriptions of the families of consciousness. [...] But generally speaking, I have simply given you an outline which follows the characteristics of consciousness as it is embarked in physical form. I am not giving you these groups to set up divisions, but to help you understand that consciousness is diversified — that usually each of you falls, because you want to, into a certain family. [...]

(It happened that in ESP class last night Seth came through with material pertaining to the nine families of consciousness he’d begun discussing a week ago; see the 732nd session. [...]

(And to me, the whole Sumari thing speaks of some kind of compassionate observation or knowledge of the human condition … or in lieu of putting it that way, of an opening up of human awareness to embrace more of the possibilities of consciousness.)

1. I can note a good deal later that Seth’s material on our making further distinctions in the families of consciousness, beyond the nine he’s already named for us, is certainly related to the passages from a private session that I quoted in the last three paragraphs of Note 8 for the 732nd session: Seth stated that Peter Smith and I “are and are not counterparts” — that with another in this life each of us may often come together, then part, “forming a counterpart relationship when it suits your purposes….”

(Pause.) If such an individual can convince himself or herself that somehow the entire affair is more in the nature of a game, then you can have at times some success, because in a game the conscious mind is willing to make allowances, and to “pretend.” In a good variety of cases, however, the formal experiment itself sets up a barrier, for the conscious mind is being asked to cooperate in a venture that it considers nearly an impossibility. [...]

The same applies to the conscious mind itself, which is not programmed in the same fashion to be the arbiter of microscopic events. [...] That blockage may still allow a kind of displacement targeting, however, in which case inner abilities are allowed to operate, but in a rather sabotaged way—not hitting the target with which the conscious mind is so familiar or concentrated upon, but hitting another microscopic target instead, in which effects are then noticeable. [...]

Now: the conscious mind legitimizes physical reality. [...]

[...] The conscious mind is set up by your belief systems to believe that PK effects are impossible, or at the best highly improbable. [...]

[...] And when you have learned it, then you have begun to learn how to handle the consciousness that is yours intelligently and well. [...] And then you can continue, you can continue to enlarge the scope of your understanding and consciousness...and as you do this, you take on a more conscious awareness of your responsibility. [...]

Consciousness left to itself is like April left to itself. [...] And it is you who project disasters into consciousness when those disasters occur.

[...] Open up the gates of your consciousness while you sleep! You know you are more than what you refer to as your conscious I. But you should know it through experience! [...]

[...] When your ordinary, conscious, waking mind is lulled in like your sleep state, you travel in other dimensions. [...]

And when you have learned it, then you have begun to learn how to handle the consciousness that is yours intelligently and well. [...] And then you can continue, you can continue to enlarge the scope of your understanding and consciousness—and as you do this, you take on a more conscious awareness of your responsibility. [...]

Consciousness left to itself is like April left to itself. [...] And it is you who projects disasters into consciousness when those disasters occur. [...]

Open up the gates of your consciousness while you sleep! You know you are more than what you refer to as your “conscious I,” but you should know it through experience! [...]

[...] When your ordinary, conscious, waking mind is lulled in like your sleep state, you travel in other dimensions. [...]

It is indeed, but what you do not understand is that your so-called subconscious is highly conscious, you simply are not aware of it consciously. Therefore, you must expand the consciousness that you know so that it is aware of this other portion of your own identity. You do not really have a conscious state and an unconscious state, they are the same. You have a consciousness. [...] That portion of you is also conscious; there is an artificial division created. [...]

[...] This is not in his conscious mind and therefore anything else is accepted with relief. [...]

[...] It is up to you to expand the nature of your own consciousness so that you understand me. [...]

[...] Now, you have a lot to do now, but consciously you are not aware of what you do, and little by little you must learn to accept greater and greater portions of your own reality in this life and future lives. [...]

The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams—and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of consciousness contributes to the health and stability of all other portions. [...]

[...] But in terms of your world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and as psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of your world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In your terms those entities are your ancestors—and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world.

These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. [...]

[...] And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.

[...] Your physical form can lie sleeping and inert upon the bed while your consciousness travels in a dream form to places quite distant. Simultaneously you may create a “thought-form” of yourself, identical in every respect, and this may appear in the room of a friend quite without your conscious awareness. So consciousness is not limited as to the forms it can create at any given time.

[...] First of all, you must understand that no objective reality exists but that which is created by consciousness. Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way around. [...]

[...] There is not just one dimension in which nonphysical consciousness resides, any more than there is only one country on your planet or planet within your solar system.

Having long ago recognized the dependence of form upon consciousness, we have simply been able to change our forms entirely so that they more faithfully follow each nuance of our inner experience.

[...] These activities certainly represent evolution through conscious intent, guided by the same creature who insists that no sort of consciousness could have been responsible for the origin or development of “life,” let alone the “dead” matter of his planet. [...] I have yet to see in those accounts anything about the role consciousness will play in this truly miraculous conversion of dead matter into that of the living. Perhaps those involved in the experiments fear that the idea of consciousness will impugn the scientific “purity” of their work.

[...] It has a validity within very limited perspectives only; for consciousness does, indeed, evolve form. Form does not evolve consciousness. It is according to when you come into the picture, and what you choose to observe … Consciousness did not come from atoms and molecules scattered by chance through the universe….

(I’m projecting my own ideas here, but I think that in all of its complexity DNA has motives for its physical existence [as mediated through Seth’s CU’s, or units of consciousness] that considerably enlarge upon its assigned function as the “master molecule” of life as we know it. [...] Some of those goals, such as the exploration of concepts like the moment point [see Note 11], or probabilities [and reincarnation¹⁶], really defy our ordinary conscious perception. [...] Once again we have consciousness seeking to know itself in as many ways as possible, while being aware all of the time, in those terms, of the forthcoming “death” of its medium of expression, DNA, and of DNA’s host, or “physical machine.”

(I want to add here that our real challenge in knowing our own species, and others, may lie in our cultivating the ability to understand the interacting consciousnesses involved, rather than to search only for physical relationships supposedly created through evolutionary processes. [...] The consciousnesses of numerous other species may be so different from ours that we only approximately grasp the meanings inherent in some of them, and miss the essences of others entirely. To give just two examples, at this time we are surely opaque to the seemingly endless search for value fulfillment that consciousness displays through the “lowly” lung fish and the “unattractive” cockroach. [...]

[...] You impose your ideas upon it and largely affect its health and well-being through your conscious beliefs. [...] These have their own consciousnesses alive in matter, their drive to exist and be within the framework of their own nature. [...] The organs possess the combined consciousnesses of each of the cells within them, and in their way the organs sense their own identity.

[...] This cooperation of consciousness continues so that you have a body consciousness that is vital, that strives to maintain its own equilibrium and health.

[...] He forms his reality according to his conscious beliefs, even while its basis lies in the deep unconscious nature of the earth in corporeal terms. Man’s “I am,” [seemingly] apart from nature — a characteristic necessary for the development of his kind of consciousness — led him into value judgments, and also necessitated some break with the deep inner certainties of other species.

Their migration is perfect in its simplicity and complexity, yet your journey as a species is far less predictable, opening avenues of probabilities in which your consciousness and free will allows you to become conscious creators in worlds that you initiate and then inhabit.

[...] With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved. [...]

(Long pause.) With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example. [...]

[...] There is no way to probe the realities of consciousness except that a personality travels through all levels of consciousness open to him, and do so in such a way that he can retain and apply the information that he receives in these inner travels.

[...] For we are outlining the stages of an investigation of the nature and conditions of consciousness.

[...] These investigations will also deal with a systematic examination into all levels of consciousness.

[...] There are indeed common mental experiences that exist in all levels of consciousness, and these are what we shall be after.

Now this event X is only one of a literally numberless amount of probable events which the conscious self could experience. For its purposes however the conscious self chooses this particular event X. But again, this event X, until the conscious self experiences it, is only one of many other probable events, different in no basic manner from the others. It becomes real, actual and different from those other probable events, only when it is experienced by our conscious self, or by this conscious self.

This event X becomes real then, in your terms, only when it is experienced or perceived by our conscious self. [...] The only difference between them and event X is that event X was perceived and experienced by our conscious individual. [...]

This is not as far-fetched as it might seem, for again, you perceive now more than you realize; although you may not be consciously aware of this, it still falls within the framework of your associated experience. [...] You are not consciously aware of the million small actions which make up this seemingly insignificant act.

The ego as you know it, the conscious self within your time system, this ego, let us say, arrives at and experiences event X.

[...] Despite himself, however, he was stretching the dimensions of his own consciousness, exercising his consciousness in different directions, expanding the scope of his abilities—and in so doing contributing a small masterpiece to the world. [...]

Those sketches of his, it seems, do not stand up as creative products as a great sculpture might, but they stand for a truly creative originality in which a consciousness played with internal material, and projected outward many of the material properties that then simply did not exist. Much of his art in those terms did not show, but the art of his consciousness expanded beyond Michelangelo’s.

[...] They are physical landmarks of psychic and artistic inner journeys, but what you do with your consciousness, how you extend it, is even more important, for as physical play is meant to lead to a future physical body that is mature and fulfilled, so the creative nature of that kind of inner play leads to future extended consciousness, an inner being that is the mature version of an earlier self. [...]

[...] The child does not consciously exercise his or her legs so that they will be strong, but simply joyfully follows the inner impulse to do so. [...]

[...] You worry and all of you worry at one time or another about that which you do not know consciously. Yet you do not know consciously how you breathe and if you did you would be dead, because you could not consciously handle the millions of manipulations that must take place in order to assure one breath. [...] These are the energies that allow you to sit as you do upright in the chair when you do not consciously know how your muscles hold you up; and when you begin to speak you do not know consciously with what word your sentence will end; nor do you consciously know how you speak nor indeed from where the thought comes. [...]

[...] Any true evolution of your species as such is dependent on evolution of consciousness and spirituality. If your world is overpopulated, you can reduce yourselves to a state of consciousness that existed, in your terms, eons ago from which you would then again have to learn to emerge. [...]

The atoms and molecules within your bodies and the consciousness within them have dwelt as flowers in the field. [...] You will learn the sacredness of consciousness. [...]

[...] You must learn how to use the consciousness that is yourself. [...]

(Pause at 10:30.) When Seth Two speaks, Ruburt initially is aware of the following: His consciousness strains upward, following an inner psychic pathway, an energized funnel, until quite simply it can go no further. It seems to him then that his consciousness goes out of his body through an invisible pyramid whose open top stretches far up into space.

[...] There are kinds of consciousness that cannot be deciphered in physical terms. [...]

[...] We are related in ways quite difficult to explain, united in webs of consciousness. [...]

[...] Though it seems to you that reincarnational existences involve past and future events, they are existences parallel or adjacent to your own present life and consciousness. [...]

(Pause.) There are states of consciousness, one within the other, and yet each connected, of course, so that genetic systems are really systems of consciousness. They are intertwined with reincarnational systems of consciousness. These are further entwined with the consciousness that you recognize. [...] Given the genetic makeup that you now have, your conscious intents and purposes act as the triggers that activate whatever genetic or reincarnational aspects that you need.

In just that one area on our globe, then, a group of consciousnesses has chosen to “evolve” into a number of religious and secular forces that are both internal and external as far as national borders go. Surely one of the larger, long-term questions those consciousnesses must be exploring concerns the confining aspects that very restrictive fundamentalistic interpretations of a certain religion must impose upon large population groups (which accept such conditions for their own collective reasons, of course). [...]

[...] I even think that the dust storms the American helicopters had to struggle through to reach Desert One were not only symbols but conscious manifestations of our challenges there. [...] Actually, the proliferations of consciousness on our planet are seamless: In those terms, the overall challenges are ancient indeed.

[...] And there for the moment events seem to swirl in place—storms of consciousness that, I think, are bound to combine in new patterns to further explore certain large challenges.¹

Jane’s consciousness had left her sleeping body in the bedroom and traveled to her writing room at the back of the house. [...] Afterward she insisted that I’d been out-of-body too, although I have no conscious memory of such an event. [...] Yet, since I’d been awake while she slept, we speculated that those same habitual cleaning chores had also occupied me enough consciously to mask my awareness of what another part of me was up to.)

[...] He was exercising his consciousness, allowing himself greater freedom. [...]

[...] They also exercise their consciousnesses in the same fashion—doodle with their minds, relaxing themselves in such a fashion, wandering off to refresh themselves—and you were both doing that, but Ruburt caught himself in the act, so to speak.

[...] I quoted a poem (on animal consciousness) from a book of sketches and untitled poetry that Jane had created for my birthday last June. [...]