“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] I have told you, for example, that trees have their own consciousness. The consciousness of a tree is not as specifically focused as your own, yet to all intents and purposes, the tree is conscious of fifty years before its existence, and fifty years hence.

[...] (Seth smiled.) The possibilities that have come to reality within this universal system have each given birth to other systems and realities, as one tree bears a thousand seeds. [...]

and rainbows and lilac trees

remembers palm trees

(Last night, April 12, 1964, I had a brief but very vivid dream, in which I saw one of the big branches of the tree in front of Stamp’s house, around the corner from us, fall to the ground.

(This particular branch appears to be a solid one in the tree, but it grows out at a peculiar angle so that it looks weak and somehow out of place amid the rhythmic patterns of the other limbs and branches. [...]

If you closed your mind and refused to see a whole tree, nothing would convince you that the part you did not see existed. If such a tree fell upon you, you might wonder at its weight. [...] If some few individuals began to question the shape of trees, and some therefore began to see whole trees, you would undoubtedly call them mad, be completely unbothered, and feel yourselves justified.

The tree itself in some ways is wiser than man. We have spoken of the inner consciousness of a tree before. But the tree does not—and you’ll have to take my word for this—consider itself in divisions. A tree does not divide itself up into a self that grows leaves and roots, and into a self that is automatically moved by the wind through its branches.

But if some of these individuals who saw whole trees began eating the fruits of the other side of the trees, you would be up in arms. [...]

[...] Walking through a forest you find many trees. [...] You however see a tree in front of you and call it the future. You think that the tree was not there because you had not come to it yet. The tree behind you, you call the past. [...]

[...] I suggest your break, and keep in mind that I will speak more on the construction of the entity, the tree analogy being a good one, because all of our imaginary seeds do not develop into trees. [...]

[...] The trees are compared to consciousnesses, all existing simultaneously; and yet this forest of spacious present does not take up space, as you think of space.

An entity can indeed in some ways be compared to a tree that brings forth many seeds, the seeds being individuals in themselves, with all the potentialities to become themselves full entities.

The wind knows the tree. The tree feels the wind. [...]

Concerning your tree: You were aware that the tree would fall. [...]

(This afternoon at 2 PM a very large tree limb fell just outside our living room windows, where I type up these sessions.

[...] The streets have been littered with debris from trees, and driving home this noon after taking Jane to work I felt several small limbs strike the roof of the car.

[...] We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. This one was fully grown and bore a heavy coat of mixed black, brown, and gray hair; the colors exactly matched those of the tree trunk. [...] And Floyd had been right: The raccoon stayed in the tree until dusk, then descended and ambled into the woods in back of the house.³

[...] Finally Floyd opened the damper a bit and lit a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace: The smoke immediately sent our very upset tenant scrambling up the chimney, across the roof and into the hemlock tree growing at one corner of the front porch. Then while his two helpers stood guard to keep the raccoon in the tree, Floyd lugged a very heavy flat stone up the ladder and planted it across the chimney; he’s going to cement a wire mesh in place as a permanent seal against animals and birds.

[...] A tree is something far different to a microbe, a bird, an insect, and a man who stands beneath it. I am not saying that the tree only appears to be different. [...] You cannot perceive the quite valid reality of that tree in any context but your own. [...]

[...] Your environment is creative in that trees bear fruit, that there is a self-sustaining principle, that the earth feeds its own, for example. [...]

Now the trees that you see outside the window you see simply as trees because you perceive them only through the physical viewpoint, and yet even these trees have potential abilities and potential combinations of consciousness that you do not perceive and that exists in other probable realities. [...]

The oak tree is sacred and any tree is sacred and any twig is sacred and one whisker is sacred. [...]

(To Ned.) And you find rest beneath trees that are not physical, and you travel quite safely in areas that are not physically perceived. [...]

[...] Imagine a man standing on a typical street of houses and grass and trees. This sense would permit him to feel the basic sensations felt by each of the trees about him. His consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree—any or all of the trees. [...]

[...] These traps are often constructed on trees, in the bark, in such a fashion that the tree gum itself is used to trap the insects. The traps appear to be part of the tree itself, so as to protect them.

“In some cases the distortion could be likened to the reflection of a solid tree in water. The outer senses, observing the reflection, might try to judge the depth of the water by the height of the tree, supposing it to be as deep as the tree is high …”

10. Besides quoting from the 18th session in Note 7, above, I presented excepts on tree consciousness from the same session in Note 7 for Session 727. [...] Therefore, your tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. To a tree the laws are simply different. And if a tree wrote its laws of the universe, then you would know how different they are.”

5. For some related tree material, see Note 7 for Session 727.

In the meantime, the spirit of that volcanic island is visiting the first island, and finds itself enchanted by the still waters that lap against the shore, the gentle birds, and the few palm trees. However, it seems that the palm trees, and the birds and the sand, have dreamed for centuries.¹

Imagine that you are a small sandy island with softly graded shores (pause), some palm trees (pause), and a haven for traveling birds. [...]

[...] One may have no trees at all, and another be the home of a volcano. [...]

Now this first island is very clever indeed, and so it sends its spirit wandering to the closest counterpart, and says: “You are myself, but without sand or palm trees.”

[...] There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that gradually became aware within that dream (with gentle emphasis), turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees.

The collection will include our family trees; my father’s journals and photographs; Jane’s and my own grade-school, high-school, college, and family data; our youthful creative efforts in writing and painting; the comic books and other commercial artwork I produced; our early published and unpublished short stories; my original notes for the sessions; session transcripts, whether published or unpublished, “regular,” private, or from ESP class; tapes, including those made in class of Jane speaking for Seth and/or singing in Sumari; our notes, dream records, journals, and manuscripts; our sketches and paintings; Jane’s extensive poetry; our business correspondence; books, contracts, and files; newsletters about the Seth material, published in the United States and abroad (independently of Jane and me); the greater number of letters from readers—in short, a mass of material showing how our separate beginnings flowed together and resulted in the production of a joint lifework.

[...] Now, the tree does not suggest the energy that forms trees. [...] The tree does not for others suggest more than you have literally put into the painting.

[...] The permanency and the timeless quality do not belong to the shapes of the mountains and the trees, but to the conscious energy that forms them.

[...] After the seascape Seth inspected an oil of a tree that I had painted in 1960; this hung beyond the seascape, toward the front door.)

(A magnificent Seckel pear tree, well over two stories tall, used to grow on the property west of our apartment house. [...] Last year the owner of the house next door, a professional man, had the tree cut down to make room for a parking lot. Jane said she seemed to use the alpha state as the base for a projection into the past and into this tree: she found herself, briefly, amid a cluster of its leaves, peering out….

It is, therefore, as if your thoughts appear within other realities as objects — alive and vital in themselves, growing into other systems as flowers or trees grow up seemingly from nothing within physical reality. [...]

[...] It is also the tree that has grown from the seed and the leaves that have grown from the tree, and they all exist simultaneously. [...]

[...] There is no difference between the leaves, the tree and the seed. [...] A tree grows as deeply within and under the earth as it does above it. [...]

([Bette:] “All right, so we go from the seed to the tree to the leaves. [...]

[...] You may feel rooted like a tree at one moment and in the next experience yourself as a beautiful peacock, in which case you will perceive the tree change into the bird.

[...] In a physical sense this board is a projection of wood or a tree, but in this case the board has less properties than the parent tree. The tree can grow, the board cannot. [...]

(“Seth, are trees and plants fragments?”)

[...] Pacing back and forth, she began to dictate:) that a tree cannot, personality fragments form other fragments having all the properties of the parent fragment—emotional life and so forth.