“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Further, Jane and I believe that what really happens during a “past-life regression” under hypnosis is that the subject (aside from any responses given to the hypnotist’s own witting or unwitting suggestions) very cosily views his or her previous lives from the comfort and safety of a present existence. This would be the case even when the subject is very unhappy with present challenges, and is trying to assign their origin to events in one or more former existences. All well and good to announce that one was a serf some 900 years ago—but one is much more likely to be either tuning into minute signals surrounding the actual physical and mental reality of the serf (poor fellow), or to be picking up on elements of that individual’s personality as they’re associated with the serf’s whole self or entity. Either possibility makes it much safer—and much more entertaining—to proclaim one’s serfdom.

My main point is that I also feel, without having asked Seth, that the farther one travels ahead in time the greater the play of probable realities and probable lives he or she encounters. To venture into such a skein requires that one constantly picks and chooses among them—for each move, each thought, even, can launch the traveler into a different probability. In some cases there will be a great fear of becoming lost among all of those realities. (What if one doesn’t want a probable reality they choose? But that must happen all of the time!) The uncertainty perceived here by the conscious self, however, can act as a great restraint toward knowing a future life or lives—just as much as might the fear of tuning into one’s physical death ahead of time in this life. Hook up those two factors with the quite natural concern that at least some events in any life to come will inevitably be unpleasant, or worse, and we have at least three powerful restraints, or psychic blocks, inhibiting awareness of future lives. There would be others. Everything considered, we may just not want to know about future lives most of the time.

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.