“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

5. The superior intellectual and altruistic characteristics of dolphins and other cetaceans are well known, if barely understood in detail. Seth commented on dolphins some 10 months ago in his final delivery for the 688th session in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality; he cited them as being not only similar to certain species that had lived on our own planet in the far past, but as representing bleed-throughs from probable realities in which water-dwelling mammals predominate.

This evening Ruburt read some [just-published] material about dolphins and whales. It contained strong hints that those creatures are geniuses, possessing the ability of abstract thought to a high degree.⁵ Such is indeed the case.

Now dolphins deal with an entirely different dimension of reality. There is as yet no method of communication that can allow you to perceive their concepts of selfhood, or their [collective] vision of existence. They are sensitive, self-aware individuals. They are altruistic. They understand the nature of relativity,⁶ and they have different ways of passing on information to their young. They are not higher or lower than your own species. They simply represent a different kind of selfhood.

Now there is some relationship, at least in terms of our discussion, between the reality of the dolphins and the reality of the fetus. In your terms the fetus lives in primeval conditions, reminiscent of periods in the species’ past. It relates in its own way to its environment. Now for some consciousnesses this is sufficient. In your terms, again, for each of you, it was sufficient.

9. At once Seth’s material reminded me of a novel about dolphins that Jane worked on in 1963. [...] A couple of months before these sessions began in late November of that year, she wrote an outline and five chapters for a novel about the development of communications between mankind and cetaceans, and called it To Hear A Dolphin. [...] To Hear A Dolphin was then laid aside, evidently for good. [...]

[...] There were several species smaller than the dolphins, but generally the same structurally. [...] There is even now an extremely rich emotional life on the part of the dolphins, to which you are relatively blind; and more than this, on their part a greater recognition of other species than you yourselves have.

[...] The dolphins are a case in point.⁹ In your line of probability they are oddities, yet even now you recognize their great brain capacity, and to some dim extent glimpse the range of their own communication.

The dolphins possess a strong sense of personal loyalty, and an intimate family pattern, along with a highly developed individual and group recognition and behavior. [...]

([Florence:] “Will we ever relate to another species, like the dolphin?”)

[...] If you are speaking specifically of the dolphin, some of their species are consciously aware of it and others are not. [...]

(Jane then asked me if her book, To Hear a Dolphin, would be accepted by the publisher who now had it. [...]

(“How much will Jane be paid for her book, To Hear a Dolphin?”

(“Will Jane’s novel, To Hear a Dolphin, be published?”)

“The creationists put down other species, as do the evolutionists, taking it as fact that no other species is capable of conceptual thought, where I think that statement is extremely dubious generally, and even specifically in light of the work being done with dolphins, for example. [...]

[...] Dogs, cats, manatees, lions, dolphins, apes, bats, whales, shrews, sloths, and deer are mammals, to name just a few. [...]

[...] Dolphins, for example, respond emotionally to man’s world. [...]