“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

The species must learn the value of the individual man. The species is also learning its dependence upon other species, and beginning to comprehend its part in the whole framework in physical reality.

The problem of war will sooner or later teach you that when you kill another man, basically you will end up killing yourself. The over-population problem will teach you that if you do not have a loving concern for the environment in which you dwell, it will no longer sustain you — you will not be worthy of it. You will not be destroying the planet, you see. You will not be destroying the birds or the flowers, or the grain or the animals. You will not be worthy of them, and they will be destroying you.