“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There’s so much I could discuss here that the lack of time and space is very frustrating. I can only hint at what I consider to be important points. The books and magazines dealing with reincarnation—and the tapes, too, these days—swarm with tales of journeys to past lives, and some of those accounts are most spectacular. Yet, even given ancient concepts like that of Seth’s spacious present, the participants in such adventures usually quite happily ignore the conclusion that reincarnation should also operate from the opposite direction—the future—just as well! As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can’t people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they’re regressed to their past lives? Indeed. Our rather copious mail brings us questions like that very rarely. (The key word there, I think, is “successfully.”)

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.)

However, Jane and I don’t particularly think that in our present lives we’ve been that greatly influenced by any successes, failures, or illnesses chosen from other lives except in the broadest of terms: general bodily and personality characteristics and abilities, say. I freely note, and with some humor, that this can be somewhat of a jointly contradictory attitude for us. Perhaps we’re too stubborn about agreeing wholeheartedly that such possibilities exist, or perhaps we’re just too enamored of our “present” physical lives, even with all of our challenges, to want to fully concur with Seth.

Well, one may ask, if a so-called negative quality like depression has a genetic foundation, what about the genetics for a positive attribute like joy—or, even, something like reincarnation? (I haven’t come across anything in the media yet about either one of those.) If reincarnational and genetic systems are intermixed, then it could be said that even a person’s decision to ignore his or her reincarnational heritage was in itself genetically based—and it could be fun to explore the contradictory ramifications of such a state. What other wonders might our cells contain? While amusing myself I’m simplifying to a great degree: If traces of one’s “successive” lives are genetically embedded, sorting them out would be an enormous task.