“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) In your terms, think of those ancestors in your family history. Now think of yourself and your contemporary family. For this, try to imagine time as being something like space. If your ancestors lived in the 19th century, then think of that century as a place that exists as surely as any portion of the earth that you know. See your own century as another place. If you have children, imagine their experience 50 years hence as still another place.

Now: Think of your ancestors, yourself, and your children as members of one tribe, each journeying into different countries instead of times. Culture is as real and natural as trees and rocks, so see the various cultures of these three groups as natural environments of the different places or countries; and imagine, then, each group exploring the unique environment of the land into which they have journeyed. Imagine further of course that these explorations occur at once, even though communication may be faulty, so that each group has difficulty communicating with the others. Imagine, however, that there is a homeland from which our groups originally came. Each expedition sends “letters” back home, commenting upon the behavior, customs, environment, and history of the land in which it finds itself.

Give us a moment … Remember, in this analogy the various children represent your ancestors, yourself, and your own children. They are exploring the land of time. Now in your physical world it is obvious that nature grows more of itself. In the land of time, time also grows more of itself. As you can climb trees, both up and down the branches, so you can climb times in the same way. Back home, Mama and Papa know this. The family tree exists at once — but that tree is only one tree that appears in the land of time. It has branches that you do not climb and do not recognize, and so they are not real to you. There are probable family trees, then. The same applies to the species.

Then think of your ancestors, your immediate family, and your children, and sense in them the vast potential that is there. Now: Imagine your species as you think of it, and the literally endless capacities for expression and creation simply in the areas of which you are aware. No single time or space dimension could contain that creativity. No single historic past could explain what you are now as an individual or as a member of a species. Period.

[...] While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods. [...] A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

[...] Biologically you do indeed carry within you, then, the memories of your particular ancestors. [...]

To that extent the so-called past experience of your ancestors and of your species is concurrent with your own, biologically speaking. [...]

[...] Again, however, as you are not your parents or your ancestors, you are not your “reincarnational selves.”

Ancestors had worked the same fields, walked the same paths, and to that extent the past was open-ended rather than closed. The people believed that those ancestors still existed in the Christian heaven—or, earlier, in the Roman equivalent and they also believed that such a dimension awaited them to give them a further extension of existence after their own deaths. [...]

[...] People just before the earthquake even related imaginatively not only to their own ancestors, but to their children’s children after their own deaths, as those children lived their lives in the same locations, in the same land area. [...]

[...] In your terms those entities are your ancestors—and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world.

[...] Not from an animal ancestor in the way generally supposed. [...]

[...] In those terms so-called modern man, with your skull structure and so forth, existed alongside of the creatures now supposed to be his ancestors. [...]

In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years. [...]

During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, Jane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal—that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. [...]

[...] In comparison with those times, however, children are now born ancient, for even biologically they carry within themselves the memories of their ancestors. [...]

[...] I didn’t see how our ancestors had survived, were the movie accurate. [...]

[...] Some families are literally reincarnations of their ancestors, but this is not the general case by any means. [...]

[...] Hitler idealized their waves of conquest in his own racist philosophy, attempting to trace German origins back to Aryan ancestors.

[...] Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back — in your terms now — through time immemorial.

In the period that you now think of as the Stone Age, the men you think of as your ancestors, the cavemen, often found shelter not in rough naturally formed caves, but in mechanically created channels that reached behind them, and in the deserted cities in which once the Lumanians dwelled. [...]

[...] In those terms (pause), your world’s reality stretches back far further than you imagine, and in those terms—you need the qualifications—your ancestors have visited other stars, as your planet has been visited by others. [...]

There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors. [...]

(“I think these animal doctors were a variety of apelike ancestor,” Jane said. [...]

[...] I was brought up a Catholic, but as I grew older I found it more and more difficult to accept the God of my ancestors. [...]

[...] These remarkable physical changes stem from a genetic “defect” carried by a common ancestor who lived more than a century ago. [...]

[...] There were fully developed men — that is, of full intellect, emotion, and will — living at the same time, in your terms, as those creatures supposed to be man’s evolutionary ancestors.

(Seth’s statement just given, that fully developed men coexisted with their supposed ancestors, led to our request that he follow through with more information on the subject. [...]

In your terms of history, man appeared in several different ages — not from an animal ancestor in the way generally supposed. [...]

[...] In those terms so-called modern man, with your skull structure and so forth, existed alongside of the creatures now supposed to be his ancestors.

[...] His ancestors had originally spelled the family name “Bordeaux.” [...]

You had the sleepwalkers,² early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms.