“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you believe otherwise, then you are limited; your environment then represents the sum total of knowledge and experience. As long as you believe your environment to be objective and independent of yourself, then to a large extent you feel powerless to change it, to see beyond it, or to imagine other alternatives that may be less apparent. Later in the book I will explain various methods that will allow you to change your environment beneficially and drastically.

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a “past” life. You will feel relatively incompetent to handle present physical reality, to alter your environment, to affect and change your world, if you feel that you are at the mercy of conditions over which you have no control.

The reasons given for such subjugations matter little in the long run, for the reasons change with the times and with your culture. You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past-life experience. Your life, for example, may be far less fulfilling than you think you would prefer. You may be less when you would be more, but you are not under a pall placed upon your psyche, either by original sin, Freud’s infancy syndromes, or past-life influences. I will try to explain the past-life influences a bit more clearly here. They affect you as any experience does. Time is not closed, however — it is open. One life is not buried in the past, disconnected from the present self and any future self as well.