“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I referred to a “successful” progression because reaching into the future is evidently much more difficult. By its very nature a future life cannot be proven—records checked, and so forth. Anything goes. Jane and I have read of many systems designed to regress the individual to past lives. Often such “trips” are mediated by hypnosis. It can even happen spontaneously, and I had a most exhilarating glimpse of a past life of my own that way. (See Session 721 in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.) However, neither of us have had such an outright encounter with a future self—that we know of. I’d say that under hypnosis the urge to fantasize the future lives must be a tempting one; but what’s the explanation for achieving little more than a formless future state while “under,” no matter how hard one tries? The failure to get there, to turn time around, could be taken as a sign of resistance on the part of the present self. (Or even a past self or selves, but that’s too complicated a subject to go into here.)

I also know that in a couple of chapters for Dreams itself Seth referred to the genetic factors involving reincarnation. He said that basically both our genetic structure and our reincarnational history are systems of consciousness, that they’re “intermixed.” The former is physical, the latter is psychic, a part of our inner bank of knowledge. I don’t doubt that he’s right—that is, in our temporal lifetimes we call upon whatever systems of consciousness we desire to, at whatever “time”: a matter of choice and free will operating within the broad parameters of our sexual orientation and other personality factors.

It would be impossible at this time, I’m certain, for a researcher to find any evidence that reincarnational heritages are coded for among the approximately 100,000 genes lined up on the 46 chromosomes we carry in the nucleus of each of our cells. We say that a certain gene contains the instructions for the manufacture of a certain protein the body uses in the construction or function of an eye, for instance, and that in expressing that code the gene passes on characteristics inherited from physical ancestors—but is that endowment influenced or directed in any fashion by reincarnational attributes as well? Might those factors be just as potent as those inherited from a grandfather, say? The genes in each cell have their individual jobs to do in furnishing the quivering templates for the manufacture (via the nucleic acids DNA and messenger RNA) of all of our bodily proteins. But if we think of our genetic endowment as first being a system of consciousness as our reincarnational history is, we can see how the two nonphysical systems could be intermixed, as Seth put it, with one influencing the other. Conceivably, each of us could be a mixed bag of ancestral and reincarnational heritages, then—more “mongrelized” than we may care to admit. Interesting…. What we choose to do with those possibilities that we present ourselves with at each temporal birth may be another matter entirely.

There followed many sessions, both regular and private (or deleted, as we sometimes call them), in which Seth discussed Frameworks 1 and 2. As can happen when we’re consciously too close to a deep-seated situation, some little time passed before Jane and I realized the obvious: It wasn’t that we were unable to tune into Framework 2, say, for help in effecting a healing for her in the joint reality we’d created in Framework 1—but that in physical reality we were drawing from Framework 2 exactly what we wanted to, even if often on unconscious or unwitting levels. Again, a matter of choices, and hard truths to face. As I’ve tried to show in these essays, we didn’t suspend our efforts to reach into that larger framework. In a variety of ways we kept trying to do just that through the screens of our emotions and intellects. In those terms, communication between frameworks is unstoppable, really: I think that if one could halt the interchanges, physical death would result. For us, the learning processes were there for the changing anytime we decided that a physical illness was “wrong.” But it would be wrong only when we decided that we didn’t need it anymore.

Before presenting the promised excerpts on the magical approach, I want to note that Seth is simply saying that from Framework 2 (and possibly from other frameworks) we draw whatever information we want in whatever way we choose to focus upon it: positively, negatively, magically, literally, skeptically, and so forth. As he told us in a private session way back on February 26, 1972: “You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule.” Every reincarnational and counterpart and probable self, located in whatever neatly packaged compartment of time—past, present, or future—can utilize the magical approach as a matter of choice, then. That simple declaration of use involves a world of understanding and experience, however, and one that Jane and I have found extremely difficult to initiate in the way we consciously think we want to—although according to their letters, at least, many of our readers are able to work with various portions of the Seth material with little or no trouble at all.