“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your friends and acquaintances will be concerned with the same problems, for you will draw to yourself those with the same concerns. I am telling you again, therefore, that many of your ideas of good and evil are highly distortive, and shadow all understanding you have of the nature of reality.

Then you are free, and the reaction is a good one. If you turn the other cheek without this understanding, however, and feel resentful, or if you turn the other cheek out of a feeling of pseudomoral superiority, then the reaction is far from adequate.

Now all of this can be applied to your relationships in your reincarnational existences, and of course it also is highly pertinent to your current daily experience. If you hate another person, that hate may bind you to him through as many lives as you allow the hate to consume you. You draw to yourself in this existence and in all others those qualities upon which you concentrate your attention. If you vividly concern yourself with the injustices you feel have been done you, then you attract more such experience, and if this goes on, then it will be mirrored in your next existence. It is true that in between lives there is “time” for understanding and contemplation.

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.

(9:58.) Your thoughts and everyday experience contain the answers. Any successes in this life, any abilities, have been worked out through past experience. They are yours by right. You worked to develop them. If you look about you at your relatives, friends, acquaintances, and business associates, you will also see what kind of a person you are, for you are drawn to them as they are drawn to you, through very basic inner similarities.

I spoke earlier of rigid concepts of right and wrong. There is only one way to avoid this problem. Only true compassion and love will lead to an understanding of the nature of good, and only these qualities will serve to annihilate the erroneous and distortive concepts of evil.

Through all your lives you will interpret the reality that you see in your own way, and that way will have its effect upon you, and in turn upon others. The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion: He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.

In such dreams, general mass-information is given, that the individuals then use as they desire. Overall plans for development are made, as the group members, say, of a town decide upon its destiny. Some individuals always choose to be born as a part of some group — reborn, in other words, with past contemporaries, while others, disdaining such endeavors, return in much more isolated positions.