“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) Since these offshoots or life-tracings each come from your entity, they are connected psychologically and in terms of electromagnetic energy patterns. Consider this analogy: Taking it for granted that you are indeed multidimensional, you can perceive only so much of your own experience at a time because of the characteristics of physical creaturehood; the three-dimensional system automatically specializes in before-and-after effects.

(9:26.) Again, what actually happens is that the energy of your being impinges, say, at seven [moment] points² into the three-dimensional system. At each of these points, what seems to be an isolated life is experienced. Just beyond those intersections, however, there is a more or less unitary and overall recognition of wholeness that “rides” above them. This represents the multidimensional entity that is both apart from and yet part of the separate life-traces. You may have an existence in the seventeenth century, for example. To you it would appear that the life was a past one, finished. You may believe that your current existence, with all of its abilities and challenges, is the result of that past life, yet both exist at once. The seventeenth century is not dead. You follow a one-line pattern of history, pursuing certain actions as reality and identifying with these so completely that they are all you perceive. Other probable actions are always occurring, however, and are quite as valid as the ones which you happen to choose and thus experience.

Your reincarnational selves have as many probable lives as you do. Your beliefs and actions in your present alter “their” experiences, as each of them, in their presents, change yours. If you see these reincarnational selves as one entity, then this becomes quite natural. The whole self is changed by all of its comprehensions.

Each portion of the entity is unique and independent, and through its own beliefs determines what it will accept in terms of influences within its immediate life situation. The great miracle, in fact, is that each consciousness, whatever its degree, is itself and no other, even while in the unending fields of interaction it may be a portion of another — as a city is part of a state, or an individual is part of a family.

In terms of personality as you understand it, the individual chooses the abilities he or she will have, and the life challenges. In the present then each person has unlimited opportunity to draw upon the entity’s energy, and the understanding and powers of all of its parts. (Long pause.) It goes without saying that any human being possesses the latent ability shown by a great artist or athlete, or statesman or philosopher. Within creaturehood there are wide ranges of abilities; these may be seldom used, but they are there as practical ideals that can be expressed within that system. In the same way, every individual possesses the abilities of its entity in latent form. These too serve as practical ideals, but in a different kind of context, for you have other centuries to play with and many existences instead of one.

These interchanges represent periods in which the soul and flesh meet under the most optimum conditions. There are individual variations and yet mass patterns. The energy of the personal self constantly comes from the entity. There is not just one intersection of soul with the flesh, therefore, but at the least a constant series as you would think of it. Because of the characteristics of energy as it impinges upon the three-dimensional system, there are fluctuations — always involving your present.

The greatest abilities of a personality may often be brought into physical expression, however, because of certain rhythms that are not understood. In a manner of speaking you can say that the energy of an entity is dispersed, striking the space-time continuum at certain angles and always bouncing back. But the energy is always in contact with itself even while it impinges into physical existence.

Now: As there are better times than others in your sphere of activity for sending rockets or spaceships to the moon, so there are peak periods when the self and the soul (or entity) coincide — when communication is at its best.

All of this happens through the window of your present. In terms of energy, again, the vitality of your entity impinging into three-dimensional reality forms a particle that is your present being. But this particle is also deflected away from the earth in a rhythmic pattern. The same happens to other portions of your self at other points in the space-time continuum, but at certain intervals you meet, so to speak. Each of your “presents” becomes charged, filled with potentiality; and your entity, itself conscious energy, is also enriched by your various experiences, by the combined and magnified power of its own “past.”

Apexes are therefore formed within each self. These apexes serve as attractions, now opened, through which the magnified potency of the entity can flow. This may appear as erratic energy, however, an analogy being sunspots. Psychologically, great ferment occurs, and often the individual personalities involved organize themselves along new lines.