“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Maybe, I thought, the experience was a delayed reaction to the projection suggestions. Just before the session I asked my pendulum a few questions — keeping in mind that I wasn’t so sure this technique should be used to explore other than physically oriented data. Usually I get excellent results with the pendulum; I learned now that the visual-interference effects had been caused by my unsuccessful attempts to perceive a thought-form sent out by a survival personality. This backed up the reasons given by Seth, then, for the eye phenomenon. Usually we use the pendulum to reach information that is just below normal waking consciousness.

(I also learned that no particular painting of mine was involved, nor were my efforts to project this afternoon; that the survival personality was unknown to me, and that the pendulum couldn’t tell me who the personality was.

(8:51.) Through denying themselves, say, intellectual development in a given life, personalities also learn the value and purpose of that which they do not possess. The desire for it is then born within them — if, for example, earlier they did not understand the purposes of the intellect. So in the time of choosing, personalities decide upon the ways in which they will develop in the following incarnation.

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.

Ideas of good, better, best can lead you astray, for example. You are learning to be as completely as possible. In one way you are learning to create yourselves. In so doing during the reincarnational cycle, you are focusing your main abilities in physical life, developing human qualities and characteristics, opening new dimensions of activity. This does not mean that good does not exist, or that in your terms you do not “progress,” but your concepts of good and progression are extremely distorted.

The psychological experience varies considerably from that you know, and yet there are hints of it within your own psyche. Here the personality must learn to group events in an entirely different way, and completely without any reliance upon the time structure as you know it.

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.