“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The plants in a house are also quite aware of the growing fetus; the plants will also pick up the fact that a member of the family is ill, often in advance of physical symptoms. They are that sensitive to the consciousness within cellular structure. Plants will also know whether a fetus is male or female.

The desire appears on this other level in the form of these electromagnetic units, which then cause a light sensitivity. These units are freewheeling. They can be used in normal perception or what you call extrasensory perception. I will discuss their basic nature at a later session, and I would like to tie this in with the fetus, since the fetus is highly involved with perceptive mechanisms.

I would like to add to the discussion we began in our last session. The fetus sees the physical environment. The cellular structure at that point responds to light, and activates latent abilities in the cellular structure of the mother’s body. Quite literally, he sees through her body and with the aid of her body.

Now the fetus also hears, and the same thing applies here while within the womb. He hears sounds from the physical environment, but also sounds within the available range of reality that you do not accept. When the infant is born, he still hears these sounds and voices, but again, they do not answer his physical needs, nor bring milk when he cries, and gradually he discards them.

[...] Does the astral body carry the astral counterpart of the fetus, or does the astral fetus remain in the physical body within the physical fetus?”)

There is great energy connected with the fetus, for at no other time in physical life is so much energy utilized so purposefully and so well directed. [...] As quickly as the new data forms the fetus and physical structure, the self from the previous reincarnation must begin to withdraw its hold. [...]

(I now asked Seth: “Can you say a little bit about Sue’s first question, about the astral body of the fetus?” Jane had read Sue’s questions some time earlier, but she didn’t know I was going to ask any of the questions this evening.)

The fetus does have its own astral form. [...]

[...] (Pause.) It seems to you that any naturally aborted fetus has no physical life at all, that such life has been denied to it for some reason. Instead, the fetus experiences another level: physical life at a different scale, that in your terms would apply to the distant past.

[...] 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. [...]

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. [...]

On a more personal level, Jane herself naturally aborted a three-month-old fetus, less than a year after our marriage in 1954 (and nine years before she initiated these sessions). [...] He did remark some time ago in a private session that the miscarriage spontaneously came about because the personality inhabiting the fetus “changed its mind,” and withdrew from the physical world. [...]

The plants in a room, or in a house, are quite aware of the growing fetus; the plants will also pick up the fact that a member of a family is ill, often in advance of physical symptoms. [...] Plants will know whether a fetus is male or female, even if the mother does not.

I will discuss more about their basic nature either this evening or at another session, and I would like to tie this in with the fetus, since the fetus of course is highly involved with perceptive mechanisms. [...]

The fetus sees the physical environment. [...]

Now the fetus also hears, and the same thing applies here. [...]

It also seems that each fetus must naturally desire to grow, emerge whole from its mother’s womb, and develop into a natural childhood and adulthood. However, in those terms just as many fetuses want the experience of being fetuses without following through on other stages. [...] In fact, many fetuses explore that element of existence numberless times before deciding to go on still further, and emerge normally from the womb.

Those fetuses that do not develop still contribute to the body’s overall experience, and they feel themselves successful in their own existences. [...]

[...] I do want to point out that all fetuses do not necessarily intend to develop into normal babies, and that if medical science, through its techniques, ends up in directing a normal birth, the consciousness of the child may never feel normally allied with physical experience.

[...] Here is question 1: When I project while I am pregnant, is my astral body pregnant; i.e., does the astral body carry the astral counterpart of the fetus, or does the astral fetus remain in my physical body, within the physical fetus? Does astral projection remove any necessary energy sustenance from the fetus?

(“Can you say a little bit about Sue’s first question, about the astral body of the fetus?” Jane didn’t know I was going to ask this question.)

The fetus does have its own astral form. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) There is great energy connected with the fetus. [...]

The atoms that compose the fetus have their own kind of consciousness. [...] The fetus, therefore, has its own consciousness, the simple component consciousness made up of the atoms that compose it. [...] The consciousness of matter is present in any matter — a fetus, a rock, a blade of grass, a nail.

The reincarnating personality enters the new fetus according to its own inclinations, desires, and characteristics, with some built-in safeguards. However there is no rule, then, saying that the reincarnating personality must take over the new form prepared for it either at the point of conception, in the very earliest months of the fetus’s growth, or even at the point of birth.

Until the new personality enters, the fetus regards itself as a part of the organism of the mother. [...]

[...] If the personality entered at conception or sometime before birth, then it has to some extent identified with the body consciousness, with the fetus. [...]

The fetus dreams. [...] These particular fetus-oriented dreams are most difficult to describe, for they are actually involved with forming the contours of the individual consciousness. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) The ability to conceptualize is present in the fetus, and the fetus does conceptualize. [...]

[...] Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the fetus genetic dreams involve the coding and interpretation of language. [...]

The fetus, for example, is remarkably optimistic, carrying within itself the miniature pattern for an entire human adult, taking it for granted that conditions will be favorable enough so that the entire pattern of normal life will be fulfilled despite any impediments or adverse conditions.

[...] “I do get feelings while delivering the stuff,” she said, “wondering if I’m giving it the best way — like that material about the fetus not taking its death as a failure, but an experience. [...]

[...] This is seen in the innate comprehension existing in the fetus. No one atom or molecule within the fetus will exist within the adult, and yet the bits of energy that have formed together to form the pattern of the fetus know the capacity and limits of their own nature, and know therefore the potentialities and limits of the pattern which they have made.

[...] Physically the human fetus bears a memory of its “past.”¹ In your terms, it travels through the stages of evolution before attaining its human form. [...]

The fetus itself, before its conception, responds to a self not yet physically apparent; and the future, in those terms, draws new life from the past. [...]

The fetus also understands that it can respond to a stimulus — to any stimulus it chooses — from a variety of probable futures. [...]

1. For Seth on the fetus — its astral and reincarnational attributes, its energy, its growth, its perceptions from inside the womb — see the quotations from sessions 503–4 in the Appendix for The Seth Material. Those sessions were held in September 1969.

[...] There is a metamorphosis that occurs with the change of the fetus from a fetus into a full-blown, miniature human being at birth. [...]

You cannot perceive either the consciousness or comprehension, condensed and latent, in the sperm, and then in the fetus, before the human body’s complete construction; nor can you see or perceive the comprehension or the consciousness that is still there, when so-called death occurs.

At the other end, so to speak, there is also a change which you do not perceive, and you do not perceive it because as the consciousness constructs the fetus from the inner plane, so then the consciousness is now beginning to enter another plane, where it is equally beyond your perception.

[...] You grew from a fetus into an adult, for instance, so obviously some part of you does know how to perform such an amazing activity as the growth and care of the physical body. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] Some of his earlier information on the fetus can be found in sessions 503–4 in the Appendix of The Seth Material.

[...] The pattern for each adult body existed in the fetus — which again, “luckily,” impulsively, followed its own direction.

[...] She looked very poor — gaunt from eating far too little — like an aged fetus, I thought, in her drawn-up position.

The fetus is propelled by the expectation of future growth and development. [...]

[...] This does not curtail free will any more than man’s free will is curtailed because he must (underlined) grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around.

[...] So much more evidence is available to you: the order of nature; the creative drama of your dreams, that project your consciousness into other times and places; the very precision with which you spontaneously grow, without knowing how, from a fetus into an adult; the existence of heroic themes and quests and ideals that pervade the life of even the worst scoundrel — these all give evidence of the greater context in which you have your being.

[...] In terms of value fulfillment over a period of reincarnations, there is as startling a psychic growth as there is physical growth from a fetus into an adult.