Species of Consciousness – the animal man connection

black leopard cat“From approximately 50 million to 30 million years ago there were innumerable species that would now seem to you to be mutated forms. The distinction between man-animal and animal-man was not as clear as it is in your time.

In some ways consciousness was more mobile, less centered, and more experimental.

That early rapport, that early mixture, would later be remembered in myths of gods in animal form. Such a variety existed long before your paleontologists realize that it did. There were many toolmaking animal species, some predating man’s toolmaking facility.

Consciousness knows all of the probabilities of fulfillment open to it. Each species carries in its individual and mass psyche the blueprints of such probable actualities.

These blueprints are biologically valid — that is, they allow the cells precognitive knowledge, upon which present behavior is based. This applies not only individually, so that the cell knows its future pattern, for example, but in the same way, an entire species will unconsciously have the knowledge of its own “ideal” fulfillment in its overall world environment.

As specified, ego consciousness grew. These inner patterns, native to the psyche of any species, turned into concepts, mental images — intuitive projections that were all meant to give conscious direction. The gods served, then, as stimulators of development. Seemingly outside of the self, they were meant to lead the self into its greatest area of fulfillment.

The god images would change as consciousness did. The various god concepts that have fallen by the wayside, so to speak, represent areas of development that were not chosen, in your terms, but they are still latent.

The totem pole, for example, is a remnant from an era where there was much greater communication between man and the animals — when, in fact, men went to the animals to learn, and from them first acquired knowledge of herbs and corrective medicinal behavior.

Historically, it seems to you that mankind was born from an animal’s undifferentiated kind of consciousness into egotistical self-awareness. Instead, many types of consciousness existed in the period of which I am speaking. The animals chose to develop their own kind of consciousness, as you chose your own. Animal awareness may seem undifferentiated to you.

It is however highly specific, poised in the moment but so completely that in your terms past and future are largely meaningless.”

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“We consider anything that doesn’t seem like usual consciousness to be pathological in one way or another. Many individuals show variations that actually represent future developments of conciousness; we’re experimenting with these probabilities… There are actually species of consciousness, but we don’t recognize them as such. Yet they shape our neurological history.”

“Some of the experiments with man-animals didn’t work out along our historical lines, but the ghost memories of those probabilities still linger in our biological structure, and in our terms can be activated according to circumstances.

The growth of ego consciousness by itself set up both challenges and limitations. This automatically meant that emerging man, in that framework, must let go of a certain kind of animal comprehension that was extremely valuable overall, but could inhibit ego growth… For many centuries there was no clear-cut differentiation between various species of man and animal… There were also, of course, parallel developments in the emergence of physical man. Again, for many centuries, there were innumerable species of man-in-the-making, in your terms; various postures, and even types of manipulation, as well as alterations in brain size and activity. In some, different kinds of senses predominated. At the same time a great give-and-take was occurring at all levels – including vegetation, for example – so that together the creatures and the earth worked out the kind of stability best suited for the particular kind of developments that were to emerge.

The known races are a dim reminder of that larger difference and activity.”

~Excerpts from Unknown Reality, Sessions 687 & 689 a Seth Book by Jane Roberts