“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You may be born into your present family for many reasons. You may find after death a much stronger relationship emotionally with a personality from a past life. If you are married, for example, and have no true rapport with your mate, you may instead find a past wife or husband waiting for you.

Oftentimes members of various groups — military groups, church groups, hunting groups, will in another life form family relationships in which they will then work out old problems in new ways. Families must be considered as gestalts of psychic activity; they have a subjective identity, of which no particular member of the group may be aware.

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.

The inner self is always aware of the hidden mechanisms of these family gestalts. Those who have been closely bound through emotional ties often prefer to remain in closely tied or loosely tied physical relationships that continue through many lifetimes. New relationships are always encouraged however, for you can have ingrown reincarnational “families.” Many of these form physical organizations that are actually manifestations of inner groupings.

Now: If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender. In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.

This does not mean that every one in your present acquaintanceship has been known to you, and it certainly does not imply a boring record played over and over again, for each encounter is a new one in its own way. Remembering what I said about families, realize also that towns and villages may also be composed of the past inhabitants of other such towns and villages, transposed with new experiences and backgrounds, as the group tries different experiments.