“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As you know yourselves, you only accept those suggestions, ideas and hang-ups that suit your purposes at this time. You are not, therefore, at the mercy of any neurosis from a past life, nor are there any fears from your present lives that you cannot conquer. I have not said that you will necessarily conquer them, but it is within your ability to do so.

The decision is your own according to your understanding. You cannot be hounded from one level of reality to another by a fear that you do not understand. You cannot be threatened in this life by fears from your early childhood, or by so-called past existences, unless you so thoroughly believe in the nature of fear that you allow yourselves to be conquered by it. Each of your personalities are free to accept and develop, from the miraculous banks of reality, those experiences and emotions that you want, and to reject those you do not want.

Let me give you a more concrete example that each of you can use in your own way. Suppose the worst, that in this life you have the following background: You are poor, you are of a minority race, you are not intellectual, you are a woman, you have a severe physical defect and you are no beauty. Now you set these challenges for yourself in a so-called past life. This does not mean that you cannot use all of your courage and resolution to solve these problems. You set them in the hope that you will solve them. You did not set them like millstones about your neck, hoping ahead of time that you would drown.

All you have to do is realize your own freedom. You form the reality that you know, not esoterically, not symbolically, not philosophically. Some great oversoul doesn’t form it for you — you cannot put the burden there, either. You have in the past, collectively and individually, blamed a god or a fate for the nature of your personal realities — those aspects, indeed that you did not like.

The personality is given the greatest gift of all; you get exactly what you want to get. You create from nothing the experience that is your own. If you do not like your experience, then look within yourself and change it. But realize also that you are responsible for your joys and triumphs, and that the energy to create any of these realities comes from the inner self. What you do with it is up to the individual personality.

You are not “programmed.” Nothing happens because it must happen. Every thought that you have now changes reality. Not only reality as you know it, but all reality. No act of yours predisposes a future self to act in a particular manner. There are banks of activity from which you can draw or choose not to draw.

(Jim H.: “I understand. I thought you probably meant the challenges had been set up by the whole self.”)

Consciousness is not made up of balances so much as it is made up of exquisite imbalances, and the focus of awareness is to some degree the result of this state of excitability. In this state all elements are never known because new ones are always being created. I am not speaking of physical elements, but of the psychological characteristics of consciousness, for even those continually merge and change.