“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Time overlays are the time versions of certain events, then. These time overlays always exist. (Pause.) They may become activated, however, by certain associations made in your present, and therefore draw into your present time some glimpses either from the future or the past. So-called present time is thickened, then, by a psychological realization on deep levels of the psyche that all events are interrelated, and that the reincarnational experiences of any given individual provide a rich source of experience from which each person at least unconsciously draws.

I do not want you to feel that you are fated to experience certain events, however, for that is not the case. There will be “offshoots” of the events of your own lives, however, that may appear as overlays in your other reincarnational existences. There are certain points where such events are closer to you than others, in which mental associations at any given time may put you in correspondence²⁰ with other events of a similar nature in some future or past incarnation, however. It is truer to say that those similar events are instead time versions of one larger event. As a rule you experience only one time version of any given action. Certainly it is easy to see how a birthday or anniversary, or particular symbol or object, might serve as an associative connection, rousing within you memories of issues or actions that might have happened under similar circumstances in other times.

The session triggered my own associative processes several times. Almost at once I recalled a passage Seth had given in the session of the night before (on April 14), when he’d discussed my attitude toward religion in general and my own sinful self in particular:

And for me, at least, the reincarnational dimensions behind our present joint situation were heightened by a third association. It lay in the unpublished 874th session for August 22, 1979—the first one Jane held after having finished Mass Events a week earlier. I felt a distinct start of surprise when I came across this passage of Seth’s, for I’d completely forgotten it: “Jane, for example, entered the fetus when it was about three months old, and accepted this as a new life. You waited longer.” I didn’t remember Jane ever referring to that bit of information; certainly she’d never asked Seth to elaborate. I hadn’t either. (That was one of the few times when Seth had called her Jane instead of Ruburt, by the way.)

I took those associations to mean that no matter what her evolving focuses in her present life, Jane should be as much aware of my reactions to her situation as she is of her own—that even though I’d worked out religious questions in a previous life, still this time around I had chosen to share with her a probable reality within which her physical symptoms, bound up as they are with the subject of religion, could occur. (But at the same time, I reminded myself, her great creativity had also found its modes of expression in spite of everything.) If, as Seth said on April 15, conflicts like Jane’s often stem from the gifted individual’s unrequited search for value fulfillment—even resulting in an early death—then that premise is at least consciously understandable. I’ve suspected for quite a while that something like this is operating in Jane’s case. It’s not that she perversely refuses to get well, even with all of the help Seth and I have tried to give her—and that she has even asked for—but that the deepest portions of her being in this physical life have other goals, toward which her nonphysical self and her physical symptoms are traveling together. Without such thinking, I was coming to feel, there could be little comprehension of my wife’s long-term challenges.

“How a belief in reincarnation and immortality added support to life, so that it didn’t seem dead-ended. That I could relax now, admitting and realizing that I did have certain fears per the sinful self’s document (instead of pretending that I didn’t). Because brought into the light I really could handle them and see how they originated. Stuff on how society operated, whether it knew it or not, on a reincarnational basis, and how association was many-lives-thick, so to speak. Only these are thoughts I’m left with, connected to the experience while I’ve forgotten the events themselves, and the scenes that were extremely colorful and emotionally charged.”