“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: The state of grace is a condition in which all growth is effortless, a transparent (pause), joyful acquiescence that is a ground requirement of all existence. Your own body grows naturally and easily from its time of birth, not expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon.

Love perceives the grace in another. Like natural guilt, the state of grace is unconscious in the animals. It is protected. They take it for granted, not knowing what it is or what they do, yet it speaks through all their motions and they dwell in the ancient wisdom of its ways. They do not have conscious memory, again, but the instinctive memory of the cells and organs sustains them. All of this applies in degrees according to the species, and when I speak of conscious memory I am using words that are familiar to you — I mean a memory that can at any time look back through itself.

“Do not do this again,” is only the afterward message. I am placing these concepts within your time scheme because in your terms they were born out of it. But the fact is that all “time” is simultaneous.

In a simultaneous time, punishment makes no sense. The punishment as an event, and the event for which you were being punished, exist at once; and since there is no past, present and future, you could just as well say that the punishment came first.

(Slowly:) I use these concepts, again, because of their familiarity to you. In the world of time they appear as real. We return once more to that moment of reflection, for it is here that both causes and effects first appear. Dimly, in your terms, it can be traced by observing the animals that even now roam the earth, for each in its own degree — far less than yours — shows that reflection. In some, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist at all. Yet it is there, latent.

Now: The greater your “period” of reflection, the greater the amount of time that seems to pass between events.

You seem to think that there is an expanse of time between reincarnational existences, that one follows the other as one moment seems to follow another. Because you perceive a reality of cause and effect, you hypothesize a reality in which one life affects the next one. With your theories of guilt and punishment you often imagine that you are hampered in this existence by guilts collected in the last life — or worse, accumulated through the centuries.

Your beliefs, thoughts and feelings are instantly materialized physically. Their earthly reality occurs simultaneously with their inception, but in the world of time, lapses between appear to occur. So I say one causes the other, and I use those terms to help you understand, but all are at once. So are your multiple lives occurring as the immediate realization of your being in the natural extension of its many-faceted abilities.

(11:50 p.m. Jane’s trance bad been very deep, her pace steady and intent. She yawned several times. Seth was right there, she said, ready with more material, “but I’m tired. I wish I were in bed this minute….”)