“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Seth is telling us a great deal here, on a subject Jane and I have done little to explore with him. We’d like to know much more. Mammals are animals of the highest class of warm-blooded vertebrates, the Mammalia. They are usually hairy, and their young are fed with milk secreted by the female. Dogs, cats, manatees, lions, dolphins, apes, bats, whales, shrews, sloths, and deer are mammals, to name just a few. I’m interpreting Seth to say that a consciousness can choose to range among such forms. However, for reasons to be hinted at later in the session, the primate man (who is also a mammal) falls outside of Seth’s meaning here.

Then as we sat for the session Jane told me that after supper tonight she’d picked up material from Seth “that I wasn’t sure of because I didn’t understand what he meant….” Involved were her questions about mammals, species, subspecies, and other classifications of living creatures. I thought it obvious that her two latest intuitions from Seth were directly related—and that certain creative portions of her psyche never stopped “working.” Quickly I tried to explain that in biology the science of classification is called taxonomy. I had only a little success delineating terms like “phylum” and “genus,” since I didn’t have a dictionary handy to refresh my own memory; however, I did help her understand that mammals aren’t a subspecies of any other group, but are themselves a major class of warm-blooded creatures.

Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its “reincarnational” existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification.¹ This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as you think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it (intently). In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind.

Every c-e-l-l (spelled), in those terms, is a sender and a receiver. All of the larger divisions of life—the mammals, fish, birds, and so forth—are an integral part of that living gridwork. The picture of the world is not only the result of those messages transmitted and received, however, but is also caused by the relationships between those messages. In your terms, then (underlined), all of life’s large classifications were present “at the beginning of the world.” Otherwise there would have been vast holes in that grid of perception that makes possible the very sensations of physical life.

[...] However, I didn’t think our talk about mammals, animals, transmigration and so forth went very well. [...]

[...] They remember the mammal dreams more easily however because mammals are warmblooded creatures whose reproductive systems bear similarities to your own.

Maturity has nothing to do with the meaning of the reptiles and mammals mentioned as dream images. [...]

In your dreams, in other words, you are familiar with images like the mammals and reptiles, that would seem not to belong to the present. [...]

[...] There was never any straight line of development as, say, from reptiles to mammal, ape, and man. [...]

[...] They go out of their way to help other species, and yet they do not take pets (softly, staring at me). There were also, however, many varieties of water-dwelling mammals — some combining the human with the fish, though roughly along the lines of a combination chimpanzee-fish type, hyphen. [...]

In other probabilities, water-dwelling mammals predominate. [...]

While in conventional terms you think of long centuries’ duration, in which finned creatures rose from the seas, some “becoming” reptiles and finally mammals, many did not make that journey but “fell” along the way. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] There are indeed two different kinds of upward-walking mammals, much like your own species, but much larger, and with infinitely keener senses. [...]

[...] The important thing here (the dictionary notes) is that many kinds of mammals were about in those far days — including “manlike apes.”

[...] At what point did apelike mammals alter their own genetic message, in terms of evolution’s tales? [...]

(Pause.) Mammals have also changed their habits to accommodate those conditions you have thrust upon them, so the behavior studied in laboratories is not necessarily that shown by the same animals in their natural state.

So in those terms, how many water dwellers died before the first mammal stood securely with fully completed lungs, breathing earth’s early air?

Give us a moment … Historically, of course, you follow a one-line pattern of thought, so you see a picture in which fish left the oceans and became reptiles; from these mammals eventually appeared, and apes and men. [...]

More complicated organisms — mammals, for example — have need of further mechanisms to construct ideas because they are able to perceive more of them. [...]

[...] This long-sought goal of science involves the very sophisticated recombination of DNA from such different life forms as plants and mammals, say, into new forms not seen on earth before. [...]