“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

If you examine your thoughts for five minutes at various times during the day for several times a month, you will indeed receive a correct impression of the kind of life you have so far arranged for yourself in the next existence. If you are not pleased with what you discover, then you had better begin changing the nature of your thoughts and feelings.

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.

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.

If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you. If instead you feel….

Now: If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn in this life and in others toward those qualities; again, because they are those upon which you concentrate. A generation that hates war (Jane looked at Carl) will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.

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.

What is needed is a basic trust in the nature of vitality, and faith that all elements of experience are used for a greater good, whether or not you can perceive the way in which “evil” is transmuted into creativity. What you love will also be a part of your experience in this life and others.

(Pause at 11:13.) Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet though you hate life, you will continue to exist. You have made appointments, each of you, that you have forgotten. They were signed, so to speak, before you were born in this existence. In many cases the friends that you make were close to you long before you met them in this present life.

In each case the individual is the judge, not only of each succeeding life, its time, environment, and historical date, but also of its overall character and methods of accomplishment. There are as many different ways to reincarnate, therefore, as there are inner selves, and each inner self will choose its own characteristic methods.

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.