“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some will choose progression at an easier rate and in a more balanced manner. They will help keep all the strands of personality working at once, so to speak, and even meet again and again people they have known in other lives. They will work out problems at a rather easy rate, rather than in, say, an explosive way. They will pace themselves as dancers do.

In this time of rest and choosing, all counsel is given. Some personalities do reincarnate before they are advised to, for many reasons. This is usually unfortunate in the short run, for the necessary planning has not taken place. But in the long run great lessons will still be learned from the “error.” There is no time schedule, and yet it is very unusual for an individual to wait for anything over three centuries between lives, for this makes the orientation very difficult, and the emotional ties with earth have become weak.

The relationships for the next life have to be settled upon, and this involves telepathic communication with all those who will be involved. This is a time, then, of many projections. There are those who are simply loners, who reincarnate without any great feeling for earth’s historical periods. There are others who like to return when their contemporaries from some particular past historical time return again, and therefore there are group patterns that involve reincarnational cycles in which many, but not all, are involved.

There are different depths to be probed in reincarnational existences. Some choose to “go all the way.” These personalities specialize in physical existence, and their knowledge of this system is most comprehensive. For these there is a movement through each of your racial types — a requirement that is not laid upon most. There is intensive preoccupation with historical periods. Many of these personalities live comparatively short lives, but very intense ones, and they experience more lives than most other individuals. They return, in other words, in as many historical times as possible, finally helping to shape the world as you know it.

Now: Dictation. In one way or another you are all travelers before you begin even your first reincarnational cycle. To make it as simple as I can, I will say that you do not have the same backgrounds, necessarily, when you enter the physical system of reality. As mentioned earlier, earthly existence is a training period; and yet as far as possible I would like you to forget your ordinary ideas of progression.

The probable system, therefore, is as complicated as the reincarnational one. Now I have told you that all action is simultaneous; therefore, on the one hand, you exist in both systems at once. However, to explain to you that decisions are involved, and to separate these events, I must simplify them to some degree. Put it this way: A portion of the whole self focuses in reincarnational cycles and handles developments there. Another portion focuses in probabilities and handles developments there.

On the other hand, all probable existence is open, and consciousness can make a door where there was none in those terms. There are guides and teachers in this time of choosing and decision, to point out alternatives and to explain the nature of existence. All personalities are not at the same level of development. There are therefore advanced teachers and teachers at “lower” levels.

They will grow in consciousness and continue their own lines of development on different levels. In one way, we are all thought-forms, and this will be further explained in the material dealing with the god concept. Understand, however, that I do not mean that we lack our own initiative for action, individuality or purpose — and remember also here that you live from the inside out. Then perhaps the statement will have more meaning for you.

Now in this time of choosing all of these matters are considered, and suitable preparations made, but the planning itself is all a part of experience and of development. The in-between existence, therefore, is every bit as important as the period that is chosen. You learn to plan your existences, in other words. You also make friends and acquaintances in these rest periods whom you meet again and again — and only, perhaps, during in-between existences.

Even the poorer peasants and farmers bought portraits of themselves, however, from perhaps less gifted artists, and many unknowns took payment for portraits in the form of room and board, and painted all the more slowly.

(“All right.”