“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In other words I am telling you that your present beliefs, in a manner of speaking, are like the directions given to the entire personality, simultaneously organizing and reorganizing past experience according to your current concepts of reality.

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.

(Pause.) These selves are different counterparts of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism itself shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience. This does not mean that at other levels you cannot perceive it, but that generally speaking events must seem to appear in a series.