“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Throughout your reincarnational existences you expand your consciousness, your ideas, your perceptions, your values. You break away from self-adopted restrictions, and you grow spiritually as you learn to step aside from limiting conceptions and dogmas.

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.

It is useless then to say, “When this life is over I will look back upon my experience and mend my ways.” This is like a young man saying, “When I grow old and retire, I will use all those abilities that I am not now developing.” You are setting the stage for your “next” life now. The thoughts you think today will in one way or another become the fabric of your next existence. There are no magic words that will make you wise, that will fill you with understanding and compassion, that will expand your consciousness.

Families have subconscious purposes, though the individual members of the family may pursue these goals without conscious awareness. Such groups are set up ahead of time, so to speak, in between physical existences. Oftentimes four or five individuals will set themselves a given challenge, and assign to the various members different parts to play. Then in a physical existence the roles will be worked out.

Change of form is not destructive. The explosive energy of a storm is highly creative. Consciousness is not annihilated. A storm is part of creativity. You view it from your own perspective, and yet one individual will feel within the storm the unending cycle of creativity, and another will personify it as the work of the devil.

The most important idea to be remembered is that no one thrusts the experience of any given lifetime upon you. It is formed faithfully according to your own emotions and beliefs. (As Seth, Jane delivered this material vigorously, her pace rapid.) The great power and energy of love and creativity is apparent in the mere fact of your existence. This is the truth so often forgotten — that [the combination of] consciousness and existence continues and absorbs those elements that seem to you so destructive.

Now: Give me a moment here. (Pause.) First of all, as a species, in the context of normal usage, you have considered yourselves as apart from the rest of nature and consciousness.

Your own survival as a species was your main concern. You considered other species only in the light of their use to you. You did not have any true conception of the great sacredness of all consciousness, nor of your relationship within it. You were losing your grasp of that great truth.

Now: Some individuals are being reborn at this time simply to help you understand. They are forcing the issue, and forcing the crisis, for you still have time to change your ways. You are working on two main problems, but both involve the sacredness of the individual, and the individual’s relationship with others and with all physically oriented consciousness.

You have set up the problem for yourselves within the framework of your reference. You will not understand your part within the framework of nature until you actually see yourselves in danger of tearing it apart. You will not destroy consciousness. You will not annihilate the consciousness of even one leaf, but in your context, if the problem were not solved, these would fade from your experience.