“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Slowly:) You must remember that beginnings and endings are realities only within your own system of three-dimensional life.

The energy of your being exists outside of your system, however, and impinges upon it in your terms, becoming “alive” physically at certain points of time and space. Your own greater energy dips in and out of the space-time continuum as you understand it. As it does, its experience becomes physical. Within that system then it leaves a life-trace. When you think in terms of reincarnation it seems that one tracing exists before the other, but the entire “chart” exists at once, with all the individual life-tracings.

(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.

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.

(Pause.) This bouncing back of energy into itself is the meaning of the dream state, in which experience that is basically nonphysical is embarked upon, and is then interpreted as a dream through the brain. Your deepest dreams involve nonmaterial comprehensions, however. Your dream, though clearly remembered, is already a translation of the physical brain. The information then enters your present, where it biologically and mentally colors your life.