“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(First I thought of Seth’s assertion in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964, that “trees have their dreams”; [in Volume 1, see the quotations in Note 1 for Session 698]. Then I remembered that he’d come through with extensive material on tree consciousness in a much earlier session. With Jane’s help the next day I found that information in the 18th session, which had been held on January 22, 1964. Most of that session is unpublished, although someday we’d like to print it in full. It contains many intriguing ideas — as, for example: “A tree knows a human being also … [yet it] does not even build up an image of a man, which is why this is so difficult to explain … And the same tree will recognize the same man who passes it by each day.”

(Next, the subject matter of the 18th session led me to recall that Seth had also discussed trees several years later. But this time, in spite of my system of indexing each session in at least a fairly adequate fashion, several days passed before I found the passage I wanted. Discovering it involved a patient combing of many sessions and notes. [If the indexes listed everything in detail, they’d end up being almost as long as the sessions themselves.] The search was worth it, though; now I had the key phrase I’d associated with Seth’s remark in Session 708. It’s underlined below for easy reference.

To your way of thinking some lives are lived in a twinkling, and others last for centuries, as some huge trees. The perception of consciousness is not limited … I have told you, for example, that the consciousness of the tree is not as specifically focused as your own. To all intents and purposes, however, the tree is conscious of 50 years before and 50 years hence.