“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, what do you suppose Christmas means? The birth of the inner self. Each of you must be reborn, not once, but endless times even in this existence, in this existence as you know it. You break out of yourselves. When you are joyful you break out of yourselves.

In certain portions of your world there were memories from other peoples and other layers of existence, and these memories for some time remained. They were part of your racial unconscious as it developed. You knew for example, some of you, that in other existences you had other abilities and used them well. Some of you, in previous existences, before this planet was as you know it, were a part of highly technical civilizations which you ruined out of avarice and greed and ignorance; spiritual ignorance. And so you began once again as savages. And yet no knowledge can be removed from you and no sense of your identity, past, present or future, can be divided from you and as you yourself do the dividing. And so in your dreams you remember the past in which you have been involved and so it seemed to you these had been forced out of a garden. Now this particular situation was reenacted many times and many places and not in one way only.

Now, you also have the memory of your future existences, for time does not exist as it seems to you now, and a portion of you is aware of your future as it is aware of your past. And so also, in your terms of time, as this sifts through to the physical being you had a great dream of grandeurs achieved, and yet you look around and see them unachieved in the morning. When your species squatted in the cliff caves and when they ran in terror across the face of the earth pursued by wolves and imagined that demons lurked in the shadows, when with ghost memories were great contrast to the world that they saw and know, and so they weaved a story from their memories. And so your legends are not only made of your past but they are also weaved from your future, in your terms, and all of these are interwoven even with your flesh. So that if all physical knowledge were taken from you, all the knowledge that you have learned since birth in this life, and that is impossible, but if it were possible still within you would always be the inner knowledge not only of your own private past and future, but of the private past and future of your kind and of your species.

The rest (to Gert) of the ghost affair—so you decided to start over and to hide from yourself your earlier errors. You did not have a conscious rapport. It is difficult to start an exam the second time when you knew you failed it the first time around. So you started out with great vigor trying to hide from yourself the fact that you had tried this before. No sense of original sin, however, is implied. This was your interpretation of certain perceptions. It was much easier to believe that you had been kicked out of a garden of paradise than to realize that you ruined it yourselves. Do you follow me?

Oh, now we want a time element and some (words missing). It will, indeed, disintegrate in the manner in which it is now known by that time. It will be disbanded in large terms, but there will be vital groups throughout the world who will join with other groups.

Now listen. Imagine an onion, and if there is someone here who does not like onions, imagine anything you please. An onion comes up from the earth and the growth principle is within it; and imagine our poor onion in the earth. You see, I am not using a flower, and the onion comes up and it insists that it must know who God is and where He is that makes him grow. And so our onion, with the full vitality within it to grow from the inside out, as all things grow, instead looks at the fine carrot next to him, and such a lovely hue, and examines the carrot in his mind to see if this is God. And then he looks up to the asparagus and to the vines and to the tree. And the tree is much larger so surely, the tree must be God. Aha, but the tree does not look like an onion so, therefore, the tree could not be God. God instead must be a giant onion, a beautiful giant onion, and so our poor and stupid little onion spends all its life waiting for this giant perfection of an onion to come by and save it. He may even hallucinate such a giant onion but all the time the principle of vitality and power and growth is All That Is, and all of it that you can understand at this point, is within the onion. The principle within it that gives it its existence. Now, if ever I find a church of onions, I will let you know.

([Gert:] “Can you tell me why I keep getting pyramids in psy-time?”)