“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As specified,² ego consciousness grew. These inner patterns, native to the psyche of any species, turned into concepts, mental images — intuitive projections that were all meant to give conscious direction. [...] The god images would change as consciousness did. [...]

(Long pause.) Historically, it seems to you that mankind was born from an animal’s undifferentiated kind of consciousness into egotistical self-awareness. Instead, many types of consciousness existed in the period of which I am speaking. The animals chose to develop their own kind of consciousness, as you chose your own. [...]

[...] In some ways consciousness was more mobile, less centered, and more experimental. [...] Consciousness knows all of the probabilities of fulfillment open to it. [...]

[...] There were, then, smaller and larger species of men,⁴ with varying conscious connections with the rest of nature. [...] There were innumerable considerations, innumerable experiments, with size, brain capacity, neurological structure, and with a kind of consciousness flexible enough to change with its environment, and also vigorous enough to explore and alter that environment. [...]

Once again, in terms of your equations, energy and consciousness and matter are one. And in those terms—in parentheses: (the qualifications are necessary)—consciousness is the agent that directs the transformation of energy into form and of form into energy. All possible visible or invisible particles that you discover or imagine—meaning hypothesized particles—possess consciousness. They are energized consciousness.

At this point in my speculations I’m usually led back to Seth’s EE (or electromagnetic energy) units, and his CU’s (or units of consciousness). These nonphysical entities—and many others of a like nature—are emanations of consciousness, or All That Is, and in “size” rank far below the tiniest particles ever observed in an atom smasher. According to Seth, each unit of consciousness “contains within itself innately infinite properties of expansion, development and organization; yet within itself always maintains the kernel of its own individuality…. [...]

In those terms, then, there was in the beginning an almost unimaginable time in which energized consciousness, using its own creative abilities, its own imagination (underlined), experimented with triumphant rambunctiousness, trying out one form after another. [...] Consciousness as you think of it turned into matter, and then into pure energy and back again.

Yet each smallest portion of consciousness can uniquely create, bring into being, eccentric² versions of All That Is, that in certain terms All That Is, without that separation, could not otherwise create. The loving support, the loving encouragement of the slightest probable consciousness and manifestation—that is the intent of All That Is.

(9:48.) Units of consciousness (CU’s), transforming themselves into EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms (underlined), each portion of physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even though this may involve a larger generalized field than your own, or a smaller one.

[...] You simply do not tune into the range of rock consciousness. Actually (pause), many other kinds of consciousness, while focused in their own specific ways, are more aware than man is of earth’s unified nature—but man, in following his own ways, also adds to the value fulfillment of all other consciousnesses in ways that are quite outside of usual systems of knowledge.

If you remember that beneath all, each unit of consciousness is aware of the position of each other unit, and that these units form all physical matter, then perhaps you can intuitively follow what I mean, for whatever knowledge man attains, whatever experience any one person accumulates, whatever arts or sciences you produce, all such information is instantly perceived at other levels of activity by each of the other units of consciousness that compose physical reality—whether those units form the shape of a rock, a raindrop, an apple, a cat, a frog or a shoe. Manufactured products are also composed of atoms and molecules that ride upon units of consciousness transformed into EE units, and hence into physical elements.

As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more specific orientations, greater organizations at your end. [...] All of these units of consciousness, again, operate as entities (or particles, or as waves or forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time—and not, of course, the other way around.

Some of this has to do with distorted ideas of both the conscious and unconscious minds, using your terms now. Generally speaking, in Western society the conscious mind is seen as coming into its own in early adulthood, as the self rises from the bed of childhood unconsciousness into its critical awareness and differentiation. The appreciation of distinctions and differences is considered one of the greatest characteristics of consciousness, and so those aspects of it are valued. On the other hand the equally significant assimilating, combining, correlating characteristics of consciousness are overlooked. [...]

In many ancient civilizations, the night with its blackness was revered, and the secrets of nighttime consciousness explored. Correlations were made in which such knowledge was used consciously in the daytime. The two seemingly separate aspects of consciousness merged, and there were flowerings of art and civilization that are, in your terms now, almost impossible to conceive. [...]

[...] Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one. The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know. In these instances the beauty and illumination of your dream state can be clear in the conscious mind, and used to enrich your physical life. [...]

[...] When this is carried to an extreme you wind up with devil cults, in which the poorly understood powers of creativity and exuberance rush out in distorted form; the undersides of consciousness are then glorified at the expense of the other, white, “conscious and objective” values.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. [...]

[...] In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. [...] Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now—but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition, [of] structure and design.

[...] In trance states, consciousness itself brings about the chemical changes within it as it, consciousness, travels. [...] When consciousness alters its direction it automatically alters the physical system. [...]

Now in the drug situation the state of consciousness desired is brought about by altering chemical properties. Consciousness, travelling, cannot automatically manipulate the physical station. Consciousness must stay out, you see, until the chemical situation has changed.

The chemical changes propel consciousness outward, or far inward. [...] It has a binding action on consciousness and acts as a cohesive.

Consciousness cannot be separated from mobility. [...]

Since these selves exist simultaneously, it is then possible for consciousness to enter, or really form, such an image, undergo experiences within the characteristic pattern of reality, and then project to another image. In all cases consciousness forms the image. When consciousness changes, or travels at certain frequencies, it automatically changes its form. [...]

He did not alert his critical faculties however, and is consciously unaware of the experiences and the information. [...] We shall have to discuss this information, in our own way, so that you can be consciously aware of it.

Ruburt was not meant to remember the episodes consciously, merely to become aware of their existence as a preliminary step. Soon he will retain conscious knowledge of them.

[...] In your (underlined) terms, there are also, of course, descending selves, in that each atom and molecule has its own consciousness and contains all the characteristics inherent in consciousness itself. [...]

[...] Perception of any of these takes a consciousness attuned to each. In my “waking” condition, I operate at many levels of consciousness at once, and deal therefore with different systems of knowledge. In my “dream” condition, or rather conditions, I form links of consciousness that combine these various systems, creatively forming them into new versions. “Waking” again, I become consciously aware of those activities, and use them to add to the dimensions of my usual state, creatively expanding my experience of reality. [...]

(Pause at 10:05.) We are each consciously aware of these transmissions. In the terms usually familiar to you, you think of “the conscious mind.” In those terms, there are many conscious minds. You are so prejudiced, however, that you ignore information that you have been taught cannot be conscious. [...]

[...] Information about the probable future is also given to help you make conscious choices. You have taught yourselves that you cannot be conscious in your dreams, however, because you interpret the word “conscious” so that it indicates only your own prejudiced concept. [...]

[...] My own usual state of consciousness is far different from yours. [...] Still, I have states of consciousness that could be compared to your dream state, in that I am myself not as involved in them as I am in others. [...]

(Pause at 9:04, one of many.) Each “particleized” unit, however, rides the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave and particle both belong. Each particleized unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles—for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. [...] Ethically, the CU’s represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man’s relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with them.

Now: I call the building blocks of matter CU’s—units of consciousness. [...] Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter that you do not perceive.¹

[...] However (pause), in its purest form a unit of consciousness can be in all places at the same time (forcefully). It becomes beside the point, then, to say that when it operates as a wave a unit of consciousness is precognitive, or clairvoyant, since it has the capacity to be in all places and all times simultaneously.

[...] Actually, units of consciousness operate in both ways all of the time. No identity, once “formed,” is ever annihilated, for its existence is indelibly a part of “the entire wave of consciousness to which it belongs.”

[...] Connected with it is the consciousness of all those who understand it, perceive it, or originate it. [...] Instead the consciousness that held, or holds, or will hold the information attracts it like a magnet … The information itself wants to move toward consciousness. [...] Your consciousness attracts the consciousness that is already connected with the material.” [...]

Consciousness, by its nature, continually expands. The nature of consciousness as you understand it as a species will, in one way or another, lead you beyond your limited ideas of reality, for your experience will set challenges that cannot be solved within your current framework. Those problems set by one level of consciousness will automatically cause breakthroughs into other areas of conscious activity, where solutions can be found.

[...] The conscious mind, with its normally considered intellect, is meant to assess the practicality of action within your world. [...] Because you are now a conscious species, in your terms, there are racial idealizations that you can accept or deny. [...]

[...] A pause lasting well over a minute.) Your current decisions to accept one specific line of consciousness as real, and to ignore others, makes such concepts difficult to understand. You train yourselves — biologically, even — to inhibit certain stimuli, yet often the body itself responds to the very stimuli that you consciously ignore. [...]

(Long pause.) Your consciousness will survive your body’s death, but it will also take on another kind of form—a form that is itself composed of “units of consciousness.” You have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. [...]

This may hardly be original thinking here, but these proliferations of consciousness imply some pretty fantastic abilities on the part of we humans—for such developments show that even though we live as small creatures within the incredible richness of an overall consciousness, or All That Is, still our actions can result in that great consciousness exploring new areas of itself. [...]

In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.

In the Preface I also wrote about how I thought the great blossomings of religious consciousness and scientific consciousness engendered by the events at Three Mile Island and Jonestown/Iran would continue to grow, once born, seemingly with lives of their own. [...]

(4:26.) The main characteristic of bodily consciousness is its spontaneity. (Long pause.) This allows it to work at an incredibly swift rate that could not be handled by the topmost conscious portions of the mind. Its operation is due to an almost instantaneous kind of consciousness, in which what is known is known, with no distance between, say, the knower and the known.

[...] “If it never happened, it would mean the body consciousness was always subservient to other more dominant portions of the personality, and I don’t think that’s true either. After all, if that was the case and things went wrong, the body consciousness could see its own death approaching, even, and not be able to do anything about it …”

The body consciousness is indeed independent. [...] In those cases the body consciousness operates unimpeded by negative expectations or concepts.

There are also occasions when the body consciousness itself rises up in spite of a person’s fears and doubts, and throws aside a condition of illness in a kind of sudden victory. [...] It is in those instances that the body consciousness arises and throws off its shackles.

[...] Your conscious concepts must enlarge so that the conscious self can understand its true nature. As you think of it, consciousness is barely — barely — half developed. [...]

Over a period of time, this can bring about some conscious experience with probable realities. [...] Nevertheless, new patterns and cognitive endeavors are being set up between the neurological structure and the consciousness that you know.

In your terms, until now your consciousness has specialized in neurological patterning. [...] Your consciousness and neurological prejudice blind you to the full dimension of physical activity. [...]

[...] Therefore, the so-called egotistical consciousness was not given complete sway. [...] An exterior separation had to occur for a while, in which consciousness forgot, egotistically speaking, that it was a part of nature, and pretended to be apart.

[...] While your consciousness thinks of itself in physical terms, whether you are living or dead, then you will still largely utilize thinking patterns with which you are familiar. Your consciousness is cellularly-attuned in life, in that it perceives its own reality through cellular function that forms the bodily apparatus. The psyche is larger than that physically attuned consciousness, however. [...]

[...] Dreams are a natural “product” of cellularly-attuned consciousness. As fire gives off light, cellularly-attuned consciousness gives off dreams.

Again, cellularly-attuned consciousness generates dreams. Consciousness, riding on a molecular back, generates a physical reality and events suited to it.

On a conscious level, again, you could not possibly handle all of the information that is available to you on other levels — information upon which your very physical survival depends. [...]

Give us a moment… The consciousness that you have, as generally described in psychology, is in a strange fashion like the bright shiny skin of a fruit — but with no fruit inside; a consciousness with a shiny surface that responds to sun or rain or temperature, and to its surroundings; but for all of that a psychological fruit that has no pulp or pits, but contains at its heart a vacancy. In those terms you experience only one half of your consciousness: the physically-attuned portion. Fruit trees have roots, but you assign no ground of being to this consciousness.

The consciousness of that myth can indeed have no origin, for the myth precludes anything but a physically-oriented and physically-mechanized consciousness. Not only could that consciousness have no existence before or after death, but obviously it could have no access to knowledge that was not physically acquired. [...]

Frameworks 1 and 2 obviously represent not only different kinds of reality in normal terms, but two different kinds of consciousness. To make this discussion as simple as possible for now, at least, think of these two frameworks or states of consciousness as being connected by “undifferentiated areas” in which sleep, dreaming, and certain trance states have their activity. Those undifferentiated areas are involved in the constant translation of one kind of consciousness into the other, and with energy transferences. [...]

This is the myth of the exteriorized consciousness — a consciousness that you are told is open-ended only so far as objective reality is concerned. [...]

Under certain conditions, therefore, the body can maintain itself while the “main consciousness” is away from it. The body consciousness is quite able, then, to provide the overall equilibrium. [...] In sleepwalking the body is active, but the main consciousness is not “awake.” [...] The main consciousness is elsewhere. [...] The main consciousness, because of its beliefs, often hampers such manipulability in normal waking life.

[...] These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. Under certain conditions, for example, consciousness can leave the corporal mechanism while it remains intact — functioning, but at a maintenance level. When optimum conditions return, then the consciousness reactivates the body. [...] Your own consciousness leaves the body almost in the same way that messages leap the nerve ends.¹³ The consciousness is not destroyed in the meantime.

Again, your own consciousness triumphantly rides above those deaths that you do not recognize as such. In your chosen three-dimensional existence, however, and in those terms, your consciousness finally recognizes a death. From the outside it is nearly impossible to pinpoint that intersection of consciousness and the seeming separation from the body. There is a time when you, as a consciousness, decide that death will happen, when in your terms you no longer bridge the gap of minute deaths not accepted.

In your reality, your consciousness is usually identified with the body, on the other hand — that is, you think of your consciousness as being always within your flesh. Yet many individuals have found themselves outside of the body, fully conscious and aware (including Jane and me).

[...] It was a way of getting you to become familiar with your own consciousness and states of consciousness that you adapt, all without knowing, into which you fall and rise without conscious knowledge. If you were aware of yourselves, you would not need me to tell you what these stages of consciousness are. But they are a part of your heritage, a part of your inner knowledge, and we want you to use them consciously and with egotistical awareness now, for your ego is not to be treated as a stepchild, as a poor relative. [...]

No one, Ruburt or myself, can have the experiences that you can have with your own consciousness. No one can learn to manipulate physical reality in the way that you can or understand the nature of their own consciousness in the way that you can. You have a unique experience ahead of you that is yours and can exist for no other consciousness in the universe. [...] The journey into consciousness and reality that can be perceived by you can be perceived by no other. [...]

[...] These states of consciousness are your own and I did not invent them. [...] The states of consciousness, however, are important for they are states of consciousness that are quite natural to you as you go about your days. [...]

[...] One portion of it faces physical reality, ordinary working consciousness, and usually it is here that you focus. [...] You do not need the electroencephalograph to let you know when you are in Alpha I. If you want, you may imagine a particular kind of pattern as being your waking consciousness, as in a graph with the very quick motions representing delta and then slowing out gently for the Alpha patterns, if you prefer. [...]

Nevertheless, the atoms and molecules within the nail do possess their own kind of consciousness. [...] Nothing exists — neither rock, mineral, plant, animal, or air — that is not filled with consciousness of its own kind. So you stand amid a constant vital commotion, a gestalt of aware energy, and you are yourselves physically composed of conscious cells that carry within themselves the realization of their own identity, that cooperate willingly to form the corporeal structure that is your physical body.

Since we have mentioned animals, let me say here that they do possess a kind of consciousness that does not allow them as many freedoms as your own. Yet at the same time, they are not hampered in its use by certain characteristics that often impede the practical potential of human consciousness.

Consciousness is a way of perceiving the various dimensions of reality. Consciousness as you know it is highly specialized. [...]

[...] There is no object that was not formed by consciousness, and each consciousness, regardless of its degree, rejoices in sensation and creativity. [...]

[...] It has a validity within very limited perspectives only; for consciousness does, indeed, evolve form. Form does not evolve consciousness. All consciousness does, indeed, exist at once, and therefore it did not evolve in those terms. [...] It is more the other way around, in that evolved consciousness forms itself into many different patterns and rains down on reality. Consciousness did not come from atoms and molecules scattered by chance through the universe, or scattered by chance through many universes. Consciousness did not arrive because inert matter suddenly soared into activity and song. The consciousness existed first, and evolved the form into which it then began to manifest itself.

[...] No — no form of matter, however potent, will be self-evolved into consciousness, no matter what other bits of matter are added to it. Without the consciousness, the matter would not be there in the universe, floating around, waiting for another component to give it reality, consciousness, existence, or song.”

On the other hand, more complicated organizations of consciousness are necessary to form, enter, and vitalize the more complicated physical structures. All structure is formed by consciousness. Defined in your terms, a fragment is a consciousness not as developed as your own. [...]

(A class member: “Every bit of matter already has consciousness?”

[...] In certain states of consciousness, particularly in projections from the dream state, we achieve a peculiar poise of alertness. This lets us briefly examine the nature of our consciousness by allowing us to view its products — the events and experiences that it creates when released from usual physical focus.

Consciousness forms its own reality, physical and otherwise. [...] Perhaps one day we will move freely within it, alert, conscious and far wiser than we are now.

It is a dimension native to consciousness, I believe, at whatever stage of being, physical or nonphysical. [...] Clues as to our creativity and the nature of our existence can be found there and from it emerges the organizational qualities of normal consciousness as we know it.

[...] I have not read that manuscript through, since it is not quite finished, and I want to avoid conscious involvement with it. Rob tells me, however, that it contains a good deal of new material on the nature of dreaming consciousness.