“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:21.) Those given to such practices — constant examination of the past in order to discover what is wrong in the present — too often miss the point. Instead, they constantly reinforce the negative experience from which they are trying to escape. Their initial problems were caused precisely as a result of the same kind of thinking. A great many unsatisfactory conditions result because individuals become frightened at various periods in their lives, doubt themselves, and begin to concentrate upon “negative” aspects.

Those of you who believe in reincarnation in more or less conventional terms, can make the error of using or blaming “past” lives, organizing them through your current beliefs. It is bad enough to believe that you are at the mercy of one past, but to consider yourself helpless before innumerable previous errors from other lives puts you in an impossible situation; the conscious will is robbed of its power to act. Such lives exist simultaneously. They are other expressions of yourself, interacting, but with each conscious self possessing the point of power in its own present.

If such information is given to you by another, by a psychic, for example, that individual is also very apt to pick up those “lives” that make sense to you now, and — unconsciously of course — to structure them precisely along the lines of your beliefs. This may not seem obvious. (Emphatically:) If an individual believes that he is basically unworthy he will recall, or be given, those lives that justify that idea. If he thinks he must pay for his sins now, then that belief will attract memory of those lives that will reinforce it; this will be highly organized recall, leaving out everything that does not apply.

If an individual believes that he is being taken advantage of, and is caught in a mundane existence, unappreciated, then he may receive from himself or others information showing that in other lives he was greatly honored — thereby reinforcing his belief that now he is taken for granted, or worse.

(“Hmmm,” she added, “I just remembered Seth gave material something like this in [ESP] class last night….” I’d forgotten too; Jane had talked about it while I helped her straighten up the living room at about 1:15 a.m. But we won’t see a transcript of the class tapes until next Tuesday night.