“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Until the new personality enters, the fetus regards itself as a part of the organism of the mother. This support is suddenly denied at birth. If the new personality has not entered earlier to any full extent, it usually does so at birth, in order to stabilize the new organism. It comforts the new organism, in other words. The new personality, therefore, will experience birth to varying degrees according to when it has entered this dimension.

When it enters at the point of birth, it is fairly independent, not yet identified with the form it has entered, and acting in a supportive role. If the personality entered at conception or sometime before birth, then it has to some extent identified with the body consciousness, with the fetus. It has already begun to direct perception — though perception has begun whether or not it is so directed — and it will experience the shock of birth in immediate, direct terms.

The reincarnating personality enters the new fetus according to its own inclinations, desires, and characteristics, with some built-in safeguards. However there is no rule, then, saying that the reincarnating personality must take over the new form prepared for it either at the point of conception, in the very earliest months of the fetus’s growth, or even at the point of birth.

You do not have completely empty shells of matter about to be filled, in that the new personality hovers in and about, particularly after conception and with greater frequency and intensity thereafter. The shock of birth has several consequences, however, that usually draw the personality full blast, so to speak, into physical reality. Before this, the conditions are fairly uniform. The body consciousness is nurtured almost automatically, reacting strongly but under highly controlled conditions.

[...]

[...] The Birth of Conscience.”

[...] With the birth of the conscious mind in man, however, the self who acts needed a way to judge its actions. [...]

Many people believe that birth, to the contrary, is a time of trauma, or even of rage, as the infant leaves its mother’s womb. Birth is life’s most precious natural process. Even in births that are thought of (underlined) as not “normal,” there is on the infant’s part a sense of discovery and joy.

We will have more to say about the process of birth later on in this book. For now, I simply want to make the point that in the most basic of terms the human birth is as orderly and spontaneous as the birth of any of nature’s creatures — and a child opens its selfhood even as a flower opens its petals.

[...] Birth is experienced in terms of self-discovery, and includes the sensation of selfhood gently rising and unfolding from the secret heart of the universe.

(Very intently:) In the same manner, the self knows ahead of time the best conditions for its own development, in light of the time and the place of its chosen birth. [...] It then preconditions its own organism to respond or not to respond to the time and place of birth, to exaggerate or minimize, to negate or accept.

[...] Each child born alters the entire universe,⁷ and changes the world of its time and birth by bringing into it action not there earlier, in your terms, and by impressing the universe with the stamp — the indelible stamp — of its reality. [...] In the first place, since all time is simultaneous, you are always dying and being born, and your later experience affects the time of your birth.

[...] “Coming out of the womb” is an event, and much better to use than “birth.” In greater terms — far greater terms than you imagine — you are aware of probable “births,” and your other parentages [that are] quite as legitimate as the personal history you now accept.

[...] You think of being one self after another, each identity being neatly separated from the others by a passage of years, an obvious death and an obvious birth.

You do not remember your birth, as a rule. Certainly it seems that you do not remember the birth of the world. You had a history, however, before your birth — even as it seems to you that the world had a history before you were born.

[...] That is the name given her at her birth. [...] (A one-minute pause.) Like you, she is presented with a life that seems to begin at her birth, and that is suspended from that point of emergence until the moment of death’s departure. [...]

[...] “Start a new book or give birth to a child?”

[...] Suspended — or so it certainly seems — between birth and death, you wonder at the nature of your own being. [...]

Dictation: Usually you think in terms of a hypothetical whole self or consciousness, emerging at birth and disappearing at death. [...] Some astrologers use the time of conception in their calculations, while others prefer the date of birth. Various religions have decided that the “soul” enters the fetus at its conception, while others argue that consciousness cannot be considered a human soul until some time later, just prior to birth.

In your terms, the person at birth is affected by multidimensional conditions, and the collective position of the planets is but one very minute indication of the other realities involved. Ruburt is correct: Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality, as well [as that of birth]. [...] Your beliefs in such concepts limit your perception, for by altering the focus of your attention you can to some extent become aware of perception before and after the recognized points of birth and death.

(As we lay in bed after last Monday’s session, Jane told me: “I’ve got it — from Seth, I think: A really complete astrological chart would have to include not only the time of your birth, but that of your death.” [...]

[...] Actually, I mean it’s about the birth of consciousness.”)

[...] Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth, and of its birth at its death, for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between. Death is therefore as creative as birth, and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.

[...] Each present moment of your experience is dependent upon the future as well as the past, your death as well as your birth. Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak, together, one implied in the other.

(Pause at 9:40.) It is not quite that simple, however, for you live in the midst of multitudinous small deaths and births all of the time, that are registered by the body and the psyche. [...]

[...] In your terms they emerge from the future and form the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what you think of as your birth and your death.

(To me again:) Your birth (in 1919) coincided with the birth of your mother’s child in that other reality, hence her stronger feelings toward you. Your birth, and that of your youngest brother (Richard) were highly charged for her — yours for the reasons just given, and your brother’s because it represented the time of your mother’s hysterectomy in that other reality. In this reality, Richard’s birth represented your father’s final attempt to deal with emotional reality. [...]

In those terms the identity at birth is composed of a variety of such “selves,” with their nuclei, and from that bank the physical personality has full freedom to draw. [...]

[...] They came together precisely to give birth to the family, and for no other main reason as far as their joint reality was concerned. [...]

[...] But through having children your father brought about the birth of emotional existence, fullbodied and alive, in sons.³

[...] Each of you are as familiar with the so-called birth of the universe, as close to it or as distant [from it], as your own recognized consciousness is to your own physical birth, for the initiation of awareness and sensation in one infant really carries all of the same questions as those involved with the birth of the universe.

The mother could not consciously control the bodily processes that lead to birth. In the truest sense, the birth magically happens, as miraculous in those terms as the so-called initial emergence of life upon the planet itself. [...]

The origin of your universe is nonphysical, and each event, however grand or minute, has its birth in the Framework 2 environment. [...]

The heavy hydrogen molecules had a large part to play in the birth of that (earlier) system. [...] The void, in other terms, can therefore be compared to a mind, and who can predict what images or thoughts will be given birth there? [...]

[...] (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. You, yourselves, through your own mental actions, create realities of which you are unaware, and you give birth to more than physical children.

[...] Mortality with its birth and death is the framework in which the soul, for now, is expressed in flesh. Birth and death contain between them the earthly experience that you perceive as happening within a given period of time, through various seasons, and involving unique perceptions within areas of space — encountered with other human beings, all to one extent or another sharing with you events caused by the intersection of the self and time and space.

Birth and death then have their function, intensifying and focusing your attention. [...]

Now I tell you: That intensification, appreciated and understood, and the experience of life and living, accepted unconditionally, can bring you in this lifetime another birth in which the doctor’s pronouncements are meaningless. [...]

[...] He did not cause his mother’s illness by his birth. Her attitudes toward Ruburt’s birth belonged to his mother, and those attitudes of his mother were far more important than Ruburt’s birth.

[...] (Pause, smile.) The possibilities that have come to reality within this universal system have each given birth to other systems and other realities, as one tree bears a thousand seeds. (Pause.) You yourselves through your own mental actions create realities of which you yourselves are unaware, and you give birth to more than physical children.

[...] (Pause.) The heavy hydrogen molecules had a large part to play in the birth of that system. [...]

The void, in other terms, can therefore be compared to a mind, and who can predict what images or thoughts will be given birth there? [...]

The new ego is quite aware of the conditions of its birth. It knows it was born out of the death of its predecessor, and for all its feelings of transcendent joy, natural enough at its birth, it fears that annihilation from which it sprang.

[...] (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.

[...] But the experiences undergone by the patients — and all of this applies to massive doses — represent the enactment, through terrible encounter, of the species’ birth into consciousness, and its death as consciousness falls back annihilated; followed by its rebirth as the individual patient struggles to emerge again from dimensions not native under those conditions.

[...] When periods of transcendence are felt under such conditions, they represent the psychic birth of a new personality from the sources of the old, and from the death, psychically, of the old. [...]

[...] It seems certain that “something” happened “back then” (as I often remark) — and that if you could go back there, invisibly studying the century, you would discover the birth of Christianity (also as I’ve remarked, although I prefer to say that “I’d like to see what did happen”). [...] (Long pause.) You might say that the labor pains (intently) were happening then, but the birth itself did not emerge for some time later.

Jewish shepherds represented the placenta that was meant to be discarded, for it was Jewish tradition that nourished the new religion in its early stages before its birth. [...]

[...] (repeated at my question) his religions, and in the power of the creative abilities themselves that bring them into birth (all quite intently). [...]

[...] When women were near birth, they performed those chores that could be done in the cave dwellings, or nearby, and also watched other young children; while the women who were not pregnant were off with the males, hunting or gathering food.

[...] So it is fashionable to believe that early man did not understand the connection between intercourse and birth.

[...] A human child, true; but an offspring in which the entire history of the earth is involved — a new creation arising not just from two parents, but from the entire gestalt of nature, from which the parents themselves once emerged; a private yet public affair in which the physical elements of earth become individualized; in which psyche and earth cooperate in a birth that is human, and in other terms, divine.

Now: Historically speaking, early man in his way understood those connections far better than you do, and used language as he developed it to express first of all this miracle of birth. [...]

(9:38.) These lifetime organizations may involve very drastic physical disabilities from birth. [...] From that viewpoint birth defects, or lifetime diseases of any kind, make no sense.

In your terms, birth defects of whatever kind are chosen before this life. [...]

[...] Often, particularly in the case of mental or physical birth defects, the incapacitated person will be accepting that role not only because of personal reasons; he or she will also be choosing that part for the family as a whole.

A birth defect is obvious, and sets up certain conditions that cannot be ignored.

[...] The period before an individual’s birth is enacted again symbolically, but in new ways, each year. The seeking toward birth is a spiritual stimuli that is then re-enacted, but in new creative ways: so that Ruburt in winter, particularly in late winter, is on the one hand working toward new births of energy and creativity; and on the other is aware of the very need for such new birth, that would be implied in a before-birth situation.

[...] It is only because you are so oriented outward from birth that this inner self can sometimes seem alien or distant and unrelated to the self that you know. [...]

That is, if you have been born in poor or depressed circumstances, then free will will not alter the conditions of that birth.

[...] It should be helpful, and certainly somewhat comforting, to realize that even unfortunate birth conditions were not forced upon you by some outside agency, but chosen at inner levels of your own reality.

[...] You gave birth to him however when you did not have to, in order to give him this reentry. [...]

There is in other words no need for you to punish the organs of your body that were involved in that birth.

(Pause.) If you take this information to heart, you should intuitively realize that by giving birth to the child (pause), you performed a kindly gesture, and opened a door. [...]