“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now I am emphasizing the issue of hate in this chapter on reincarnation because its results can be so disastrous. A man who hates always believes himself justified. He never hates anything that he believes to be good. He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.

Now sometimes, there are also such variations in that the inhabitants of a particular town now may be the reborn inhabitants of those who lived, say, in 1632 in a small Irish village. They may be transposed to a town in Idaho.

Some who wanted to travel from the Old World to the New, may be reborn in the new one. You must remember also that abilities from past lives are at your disposal for your present use. You reap your own rewards. Information concerning these is often given to you in the sleep state, and there is a kind of gestalt type of dream, a root dream, by which those who have known each other in past lives now communicate.