“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your own environment includes far more than you may have supposed. Earlier I referred to your environment in terms of the daily physical existence and surroundings with which you are currently connected. In actuality, you are aware of very little of your larger, more extensive environment. Consider your present self as an actor in a play; hardly a new analogy, but a suitable one. The scene is set in the twentieth century. You create the props, the settings, the themes; in fact you write, produce, and act in the entire production — you and every other individual who takes part.

You are so focused in your roles, however; so intrigued by the reality that you have created, so entranced by the problems, challenges, hopes, and sorrows of your particular roles that you have forgotten they are of your own creation. This intensely moving drama, with all its joys and tragedies, can be compared with your present life, your present environment, both individually and en masse.

But there are other plays going on simultaneously, in which you also have a part to play. These have their own scenery, their own props. They take place in different periods of time. One may be called “Life in the twelfth century A.D.” One may be called “Life in the eighteenth century,” or “in 500 B.C.,” or “in A.D. 3000.” You also create these plays and act in them. These settings also represent your environment, the environment that surrounds your entire personality.

I am speaking of the portion of you who is taking part in this particular period piece, however; and that particular portion of your entire personality is so focused within this drama that you are not aware of the others in which you also play a role. You do not understand your own multidimensional reality; therefore it seems strange or unbelievable when I tell you that you live many existences at one time. It is difficult for you to imagine being in two places at once, much less in two or more times, or centuries.

Each of you are now involved in a much larger production, in which you all agree on certain basic assumptions that serve as a framework within which the play can occur. The assumptions are that time is a series of moments one after another; that an objective world exists quite independently of your own creation and perception of it; that you are bound within the physical bodies that you have donned; and that you are limited by time and space.

This leads you to think in terms of a very limited progress, both in individual terms and in terms of your species as a whole. You think, those of you who have even considered reincarnation, “Well, certainly the race must have progressed from the time of the Middle Ages,” although you greatly fear it has not; or you turn to technological progress and say, “At least we have come a long way in that direction.”

In each play, both individually and en masse, different problems are set up. Progress can be measured in terms of the particular ways in which those problems were solved or not solved. Great advances have been made in certain periods. For example, great offshoots appeared that from your viewpoint you might not consider progress at all.

(According to Seth, each individual chooses the time and place of every “life” in his reincarnational cycle.)

Your own multidimensional personality is so endowed that it can have these experiences and still retain its identity. It is, of course, affected by the various plays in which it takes part. There is instant communication and an instant, if you prefer, feedback system.

These plays are hardly without purpose. In them the multidimensional personality learns through its own actions. It tries out an endless variety of poses, behavior patterns, attitudes, and changes others as a result.

(10:26.) You are the multidimensional self who has these existences, who creates and takes part in these cosmic passion plays, so to speak. It is only because you focus in this particular role now that you identify your entire being with it. You have set these rules for yourself for a reason. And consciousness is in a state of becoming, and so this multidimensional self of which I speak is not a psychological structure completed and done with. It is also in a state of becoming.

(10:32.) Therefore it creates varieties of conditions in which to operate, and sets itself challenges, some doomed to failure in your terms, at least initially, because it must first create the conditions which will bring new creations about. And all of this is done with great spontaneity and unbounded joy. (Pause.)

You therefore create far more environments than you realize. Now, each actor, going about the role, focused within the play, has an inner guide line. He is not left, therefore, abandoned within a play that he has forgotten in his own creation. He has knowledge and information that comes to him through what I call the inner senses.

In these periods he understands that he had his hand in the writing of the play, and he is freed from those assumptions that bind him while he is actively concerned with the drama’s activities. These periods, of course, coincide with your sleep states and dreaming conditions; but there are also other times when each actor sees quite clearly that he is surrounded by props, and when his vision suddenly pierces the seeming reality of the production.

There is great cooperation behind such momentous productions, and in playing his role, each actor first actualizes himself within three-dimensional reality. The multidimensional self cannot act within three-dimensional reality until it materializes a portion of itself within it. Do you follow me?

Within this reality, it then brings about all kinds of creativity and development that could not appear otherwise. It must then propel itself from this system however, through another act, another actualization on the part of itself that is three-dimensional.

Now it seems to you, of course, that you are the only conscious part of yourself, for you are identifying with the actor in this particular production. The other portions of your multidimensional personality, in these other reincarnational plays, are also conscious, however. And because you are a multidimensional consciousness, “you” are also conscious in other realities beside these.

(11:24 P.M. Seth’s production of his book had come to be a natural part of the framework by now. He was also beginning to deviate somewhat from the outline he’d given in the 510th session on January 10, 1970, but we had expected this. Seth was on his own, Jane said. Many people knew about his book by now.