“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And do not judge according to your egotistical ideas alone. I am speaking to you now since you have set yourself (Brad) some problems. It took courage to set yourself the particular problems that you did for this existence, otherwise you would have tackled so many at one time, so to speak. There were certain truths that you found difficult to face. Now when I say this, I do not mean that the truths were difficult. I merely mean that in past lives there were certain portions of reality in which you did not have experience. And in this life you decided to experience these. And you are so doing and you are working toward solutions. If you knew this and if you knew what the problems were at this point, the problems would not be as real and the solutions would not be as valid. It would be like cheating in an examination.

...It means that the personality exists in many dimensions at once. Now this includes not only reincarnational material in your terms, but the realization that the personality in the dream state is actually as alert and conscious as it is in the waking state. Now pretend for a moment that you are your dreaming self. And you want to understand the nature of physical reality. So you must peek out at physical reality, while the body sleeps and the eyes are closed and the senses are “dimmed” in your terms. You would gain little information, and yet you are in the same position attempting to understand the nature of the dreaming state with your waking consciousness.

Once psychology realizes that the personality is also alert and conscious in the dream state, then indeed its precepts and its bases must change. For information is given to you not only in your waking, conscious, alert daily life but in what you would call your unconscious sleep state. Now your sleeping self is awake all of the time—you dream all of the time. Your dream life is continuous, only your waking ego closes out the inner stimuli and does not see it, for it must concentrate upon physical daily reality. But it can learn to look inward, change the focus of its awareness and take quick pictures of this inner environment. So more than reincarnational existences are involved.

There is a friend of yours who does not have too much time here. Now I am speaking comparatively and am not giving you times and dates. This is a male. It is a strange relationship you had, for he was an uncle of yours in a past life. And there are undercurrents that still remain. The undercurrents are important—they make sense of a relationship that otherwise would make you question it—for why do you like this person so much, you see? And he was a beloved uncle. Now there seems to be another younger man connected perhaps with one of your daughters, who may be offered either a new job or something new in his line of work that may tax him and yet he will feel that he must accept it—for he is driven by ambition—and he will accept it. There is also a younger woman close to you and with her there will be an entirely new turn, a change of lifestyle.

She was vital to you as a symbol but not a symbol of independence, but as a symbol of dependence. And neither of you would have agreed to the separation nor would the separation have taken place until both of you realized that it was time for this event to occur.

This is a natural situation. However, the situation is a cover over the initial problem. And you will get nowhere—either in the relationship or without it—until you assert yourself in relation to your environment and realize that you are strong enough on your own to survive in physical reality. This is the problem that has been shielded behind the relationship. It is your fear that you could not survive that made you cling to the relationship. And it is still that fear that would make you want to continue it.

For many reasons having to do with your own past existence, and with your mother in this life, there was a basic insecurity and a feeling that you were not strong enough to survive on your own. This is what you must solve, and you are now ready to solve it, or the relationship between you and your wife would not have reached this point.

Consciously you knew this was a rich country in your present life, but unconsciously you held to these old feelings of fear. Now these old feelings also hung over you in that you felt that existence was much more difficult than it actually is now, and you are still relating to this old existence where times were so difficult. Now in that time, you definitely needed—and you had—someone to help you. In that life, in that life of which I am speaking—you had a man, roughly resembling your wife in bone structure, and in temperament. This man was not a family relationship...was not in a family relationship. He befriended you; you depended upon him. You have projected this upon your wife. The man was the kind who gained feelings of superiority and pleasure from helping you, but also helped you quite legitimately and kindly. When you found this sort of a woman in this life, for your own reasons, you were attracted to her. Now she, for quite other reasons, was attracted to you, but you have been terrified that alone you could not make it and would not survive.

Now. Consciously—before this evening—you thought and you told yourself you could hold a position but you could not. If you were able to do so you would have done so. The tie-up between the past existence and the present one will affect you the same way in this case as it did in the case of your weight. Before you were indulging in wishful thinking. Now you should have the purpose and the inner realization that you can indeed achieve this regardless of your environment.