“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:01.) The memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before your [mental] eyes, so that its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of your life will also shimmer and change. Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories. Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that you recognize as belonging to this life.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period you recognize. Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses — never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

In a quiet moment, off guard, you might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs. In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory sheds its cast upon the recalled event. There is a floating quality about one portion of the memory.

As your cells have their own memories, so the conscious mind has a more overt kind of memory. Your conscious thoughts act as triggers, bringing both kinds of memory into activation. [...] In your terms this is your working material, the memory of your physical being since the time of its conception in corporeal form. There are [in your memory] the most complex organizations and associative frameworks, that exist both in the depths of your cellular structure and in the highest reaches of your conscious activity.

[...] The cells within your hand contain within themselves memories your conscious mind would be dazzled to behold. [...] Some of those memories will certainly be played back, to affect what you think of as your current experience at twenty-seven. [...]

[...] The memory of all of its experiences is retained. [...]

Each physical cell is in its way a miniature brain, with memory of all of its personal experiences and of its relationship with other cells, and with the body as a whole. [...]

Inner portions of your personality also have memory of all of your dreams. [...] These memory systems are all interconnected. Now in the same way you have your memory of past lives, all quite complete and all operating in the entire memory system.

[...] Normal waking consciousness, while having memory of itself, obviously does not retain all memory all of the time. It is said that memory of past events drops back into the subconscious. [...]

(Pause at 10:23.) In periods of conscious “blank spots” or certain fluctuations, these memory systems are often perceived. As a rule the conscious mind with its own memory system will not accept them. [...]

[...] To a large extent it has memory only of itself and its own perceptions. [...]

There was some question in the article about long-term and short-term memory. [...] (Long pause at 9:10.) Previous life memories, existing electronically and magnetically, may carry such intense charge that they superimpose themselves in the present physical structure, and form memory patterns quite alien to those of the present ego personality.

This would imply short-term memory you see, but this is not the case, for it is intensity and not duration that makes the difference. [...] In terms of intensity alone, both the foot and the hip symptoms were highly charged, representing of course degrees of immobility and withdrawal—learned, you see, from the mother: a memory reaction adopted without conscious thought.

[...] I am mentioning this in line with an article you both read on memory.

Illness in many ways is a learned response, and it follows patterns set up in the system having to do with memory banks, though we shall find a better word here.

(Pace slower.) They not only have a reality in the psyche, however, but they are imbedded in genetically codified data by the inner self — a genetic memory of past psychic events — transposed into the genetic memory of the very cells that compose the body.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved. [...] The physical pattern of the present body, therefore, is a genetic memory of the self’s past physical forms, and of their strengths and weaknesses. [...]

[...] The body does not only carry memory biologically of its own past condition in this life therefore, but indelibly with it, even physically, are the memories of the other bodies that the personality has formed in previous reincarnations.

[...] As a rule, conscious memory of these is not retained. [...]

Yet in such a small mass these intensities contain memories and experiences, electromagnetically coiled one within the other, through which I can travel, even as I can travel through other selves which I have known and which are a portion of my identity—and even as you, so large and bulky in your size, are still a portion of those memories that exist within my identity, and yet so beautifully unpredetermined. For you do not exist as finished or completed personalities within my memory, but you grow within my memory.

You grow through my memory as a tree grows up through space, and my memory changes as you change. My memory of you includes your probable selves, and all these coordinates exist simultaneously in a point that takes up no space.

This personal kind of cellular memory in turn triggers other layers within the cells to varying degrees. Again, each atom and molecule contains within it “memory” of its “previous” experiences. According to the state of illumination or grace, those mass memories may be activated that do not necessarily involve your personal experience — though your own involvement and the events of your life may appear within them in an entirely different framework than the one with which you are familiar.

Any event of your life is written in the memory of the universe, for example, as you think of it. (Pause.) So in a state of illumination private cellular memory may be animated, and beyond this, a deeper level of knowing in which your own birth and death may or may not be explained.

[...] (Jane leaned forward for emphasis:) Such massive doses of LSD chemically activate all levels of cellular memory to such an extent that in certain terms they are no longer in charge of themselves, and the memories can then emerge unpredictably when the system is under stress. [...]

(10:14.) These natural states activate within your cells “past” memory having to do with joyful cellular response, brought about by particular events in your lifetime whether you are aware of them or not.

[...] What memories are mine?

If you have succeeded here, then memories and images will flash through your mind in the same way that your present self would ordinarily recall its past.

[...] You may then imagine its image merging with your own, and its memories a part of your own consciousness. [...]

[...] You may instead feel the stirrings of memory, and experience yourself using abilities developed as a past personality. [...]

After death, the entity will have its ghost images (memories) at its command, though their apparent sequence will no longer apply. Memories are properties of the subconscious energy entity and, as such, are indestructible (though they may be unavailable to the individual under various circumstances).

[...] The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. [...]

[...] But memory produced another dimension in the animal and man carried it further. No longer did memory flicker briefly and disappear, enclosing him in darkness again. [...]

[...] But on the night of our return to Elmira, I awakened suddenly with the memory of a disquieting dream which bothered me so much that I awakened Rob. [...]

(9:15.) Now, as you have memory of your waking life and as you retain a large body of such memory for daily physical encounters, and as this fount of memory provides you with a sense of daily continuity, so also does your dreaming self have an equally large body of memory. [...]

Now: Since your conscious memory is connected so strongly with awareness within the body, although you leave the body when it sleeps, the waking consciousness usually has no memory of this.

In the sleeping state, you have memory of everyone you have ever met in your dreams, though you may or may not have met some of these people in your daytime existence. [...]

3. Speaking literally, because of their dissolution upon the death of their host, the man’s cells won’t become part of the animal’s structure — but at least some of the long-lived molecular components of those cells could do so, and with all their memories intact. I think there’s more to the idea than such a “tight” interpretation as this, however; with possibly the transference of cellular memory (or some equivalent quality) from creature to creature being involved. [...]

[...] As an analogy, the innate knowledge of probabilities that Seth postulates here may be related to the brain in the same way that memory evidently “happens” throughout its parts, instead of being localized in just one of them.

[...] And in Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks, Seth briefly mentions the eventual activation of “new areas” in the brain to “physically take care of” past-life memories. [...]

I am not speaking of usual, but fairly unusual events, when, in one fashion or another, reincarnational memory seems to bleed through to the present life. [...]

Since they are often frightened and unsure of the future, they are more apt to cast their thoughts backwards into their early childhoods, reaching for their earliest memories, and mentally try to gain comfort from the remembered sounds of beloved voices, only to mentally glimpse other images than they expected, or to hear other voices than those for which they yearned.

[...] They remain only as memories, having opened up the person’s mind to larger visions of life than he or she may have entertained before.

Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursion into the experience of past, present and future. [...] It needed the existence of a sophisticated memory system in which new situations and experiences could be judged against recalled ones, and evaluations made in an in-between moment of reflection.

[...] Unfortunately, artificial guilt takes on the same attributes, utilizing both memory and projection. Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. [...]

[...] Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.

You can dip into cellular memory, for example. Using memory, you follow but one recognized sequence of remembered events backward. [...]

[...] The future incident may then occur in its time sequence, and you recognize it through memory, in which case your reactions in that future present will be altered because of the seemingly past memory.

In such a way the cells retain their memory, though you do not perceive it, and the body is aware of so-called future occurrences, though as a rule you do not consciously sense this. [...]

[...] Under particular conditions a memory may suddenly become more real than the event of the present moment, and so rush again into your current experience as validly as when it was first lived, and even seem to blot out the occurrences of the moment.

Your ego gains assurance from what seems to be the memory of its immediate past. A man who loses memory of past events feels insecure and lost, but other types of personality gestalts operate far differently. [...]

From what I have told you it is obvious that there can be memory of the future as well as memory of the past.

[...] They also have memory of the past and future, but always experienced within the context of the present; and this is quite at variance with your own experience.

[...] Jane’s trance had been good; she retained little memory of what she had said since first break.)

It is true however to say that the memories of the physically-oriented ego take their place with memories that were once subconscious. [...] The memories remain in physical existence. [...]

[...] The physically-oriented ego, if it alone survived, would contain only your conscious memories. [...]

Feelings and sensations and memories that it knows nothing of have built up your psychological identity, and given you a sense of continuity. [...]

[...] When she went into the bedroom for her 11 AM nap she ended up getting some forgotten memories about the dishonest treatment she’d received from her mother. Quite a bit of emotion was attached to the memories. [...] At the same time, it seemed obvious that these memories surfacing represented a therapeutic instance of what Seth had said would happen: memories bubbling to the surface where they could be examined and defused, instead of being kept repressed in the past. [...]

It was also excellent that one such memory carried with it a direct emotional response. [...]

When memories come concerning his background, then these can be used to provide a necessary feedback system. [...]

If he journeyed through his memories trying to find a different kind of proof instead, then in that same past he would discover instances when he did relate well with others. Your present beliefs structure the memories which will parade before you now — and what you remember will then seem to justify the beliefs.

Those memories will be used to reach any conclusion, as statistics can be used, for example. [...]

(10:45.) It is for this reason that “past-life information” is so often used to reinforce current personal social situations — because, like the past in this life, such memories are constructed through present belief.

[...] If he thinks he must pay for his sins now, then that belief will attract memory of those lives that will reinforce it; this will be highly organized recall, leaving out everything that does not apply.

[...] The music, the chants, are richly endowed with what you might call for now racial memory, striking psychic as well as biological chords, and thereby releasing certain inner mechanisms and memories.

Hopefully the memories will later become memories of the future as well as the past. [...]

[...] They do not have conscious memory, again, but the instinctive memory of the cells and organs sustains them. All of this applies in degrees according to the species, and when I speak of conscious memory I am using words that are familiar to you — I mean a memory that can at any time look back through itself.

In some animals, for instance, the rising of such conscious memory is apparent, yet still highly limited, specialized. A dog may remember where he saw his master last, but without being able to summon the memory, and operating without the kind of mental associations that you use. [...]