“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your rate of learning depends entirely upon you, however. Limited, dogmatic, or rigid concepts of good and evil can hold you back. Too narrow ideas of the nature of existence can follow you through several lives if you do not choose to be spiritually and psychically flexible.

Those who do not take advantage of such opportunities in this life often do not do so when it is over. Consciousness will expand. It will create. It will turn itself inside out to do so. There is nothing outside of yourself that will force you to understand these issues or face them.

As you will see later in this book, you can do so. There is no rule saying that in each life you must meet again those whom you have known before; and yet through the nature of attraction, that is often the case.

(Humorously): I do not keep you busy all the time, because you are such a good friend.

Now: I can’t compete with a sausage sandwich — but then, you do not have a sausage sandwich now. We will continue dictation.

Let me try to throw some light upon what I am trying to tell you. First of all, love always involves freedom. If a man says he loves you and yet denies you your freedom, then you often hate him. Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion. This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglements through various lives.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours. If you insist upon harboring hatreds within you now, you are very likely to continue doing so. On the other hand, those sparks of truth, intuition, love, joy, creativity, and accomplishment gained now, will work for you then as they do now.

(“Sure. Why do you ask?”

(A spirited conversation sprang up now between the four of us. Sue brought up the question of overpopulation. How can this be, she wondered: If a certain number of entities were responsible for the creation of our physical world, where do the extra human beings come from? I told her that, according to Seth, each personality making up an entity could manifest itself physically as often as it chose to. Seth then interrupted us at 11:40.)

In physical reality, therefore, you are seeing the results. Now those personalities who are returning are doing so for various reasons. Some of them are drawn to physical life again because of these attitudes. They are those who in the past, in your terms, strove for physical existence without consideration for the rights of other species. They are driven to return because of their own desires.

The problem of war will sooner or later teach you that when you kill another man, basically you will end up killing yourself. The over-population problem will teach you that if you do not have a loving concern for the environment in which you dwell, it will no longer sustain you — you will not be worthy of it. You will not be destroying the planet, you see. You will not be destroying the birds or the flowers, or the grain or the animals. You will not be worthy of them, and they will be destroying you.