“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event. The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the part of each person involved, of course, so that the event’s implications and basic meanings may differ according to the focus of each participant. That given event, in your terms happening for the first time, say, begins to “work upon” the participants. Each one brings to it his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations — so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

You are used to a time structure, so that you remember something that happened at a particular time in the past. Usually you can place events in that fashion. There are neurological pockets, so to speak, so that biologically the body can place events as it perceives activity. Those neurological pulses are geared to the biological world you know.

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period you recognize. Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses — never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

When such other-life memories do come to the surface, they are of course colored by it, and their rhythm is not synchronized. They are not tied into your nervous system as precisely as your regular memories. Your present gains its feeling of depth because of your past as you understand it. In certain terms, however, the future represents, say, another kind of depth that belongs to events. A root goes out in all directions. Events do also. But the roots of events go through your past, present, and future.

Often by purposefully trying to slow down your thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, you can become aware of memories from other lives — past or future. To some extent you allow other neurological impulses to make themselves known. There may often be a feeling of vagueness, because you have no ready-made scheme of time or place with which to structure such memories. Such exercises also involve you with the facts of the events of your own life, for you automatically are following probabilities from the point of your own focus.

It would be most difficult to operate within your sphere of reality without the pretension of concrete, finished events. You form your past lives now in this life as surely as you form your future ones now also.

Simultaneously, each of your past and future selves dwell in their own way now, and for them the last sentence also applies. It is theoretically possible to understand much of this through an examination-in-depth of the events of your own life. Throwing away many taken-for-granted concepts, you can pick a memory. But try not to structure it — a most difficult task — for such structuring is by now almost automatic.

Your memories serve to organize your experience and, again, follow recognized neurological sequences. Other-life memories from the future and past often bounce off of these with a motion too quick for you to follow.

In a quiet moment, off guard, you might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs. In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory sheds its cast upon the recalled event. There is a floating quality about one portion of the memory.

This happens more often than is recognized, because usually you simply discount the feeling of strangeness, and drop the part of the memory that does not fit. Such instances involve definite bleedthroughs, however. By being alert and catching such feelings, you can learn to use the floating part of the otherwise-recognizable memory as a focus. Through association that focus can then trigger further past or future recall. Clues also appear in the dreaming state, with greater frequency, because then you are already accustomed to that kind of floating sensation in which events can seem to happen in their own relatively independent context.

Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

Now: In certain terms the past, present, and future [of your present life] are all compressed in any given moment of your experience.

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self. That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions. You do not need a time machine to alter the past or the future.

The point is that past events grow. They are not finished. With that in mind, you can see that future lives are very difficult to explain from within your framework. A completed life in your terms is no more completed or done than any event. There is simply a cutoff point in your focus from your framework, but it is as artificial as, basically, perspective is applied to painting.

(11:05. Now Seth went into the more personal Part 2 of the session, explaining how in her own case Jane could give her past self in this life her current knowledge, so that through the resulting “psychological synthesis” she would be better equipped to handle certain challenges.

Were you born once in winter,
in Europe’s ice and snow,
when villages were dark at night
and wolves roamed the towering hills?
Or dark-skinned, did your swaddling cry
pierce Egypt’s early dawn?
How many birthdays come and gone,
how many homelands, each your own?
How many loves have whispered through
the patterns of your mind?
How many sons and daughters have grown
from your womb or loins?
What voices merge with mine
to wish you happy birthday,
and what loves within your past
lay out a feast of wine and cakes?