“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Two sessions have been held since our return home — to answer questions and handle other matters raised by the tour. Now with this work taken care of, Jane was eager for Seth to resume work on his book.

Now: Throughout your reincarnational existences you expand your consciousness, your ideas, your perceptions, your values. You break away from self-adopted restrictions, and you grow spiritually as you learn to step aside from limiting conceptions and dogmas.

(9:45.) Now: From within your point of reference it is often difficult for you to perceive that all events work toward creativity, or to trust in the spontaneous creativity of your own natures. Within your system, to kill is obviously a moral crime, but to kill another in punishment only compounds the original error. Someone very well known who established a church — if you will, a civilization — once said, “Turn the other cheek if you are attacked.” The original meaning of that remark, however, should be understood. You should turn the other cheek because you realize that basically the attacker only attacks himself.

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.

Now: I can’t compete with a sausage sandwich — but then, you do not have a sausage sandwich now. We will continue dictation.

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.

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.

To die with hatred for any cause or people, or for any reason, is a great disadvantage. You have all kinds of opportunities now to recreate your personal experience in more beneficial ways, and to change your world.

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.

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 you may take your break. Begin your chatter and I will listen.

Now: Far be it from me to interrupt your edifying conversation. Remember what you concentrate upon, and we will leave it at that. Now we will resume dictation.

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.

I will end our session now that the chapter is begun. I have the feeling that we will have some extra sessions in any case. I wish my friends over here a hearty good evening; and when you both travel next (Seth has been helping Carl and Sue with astral travel), I hope you bring your memories along with you — and (to me) you too.

(A spirited conversation sprang up now between the four of us. Sue brought up the question of overpopulation. How can this be, she wondered: If a certain number of entities were responsible for the creation of our physical world, where do the extra human beings come from? I told her that, according to Seth, each personality making up an entity could manifest itself physically as often as it chose to. Seth then interrupted us at 11:40.)

Now: Give me a moment here. (Pause.) First of all, as a species, in the context of normal usage, you have considered yourselves as apart from the rest of nature and consciousness.

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.

Now: Some individuals are being reborn at this time simply to help you understand. They are forcing the issue, and forcing the crisis, for you still have time to change your ways. You are working on two main problems, but both involve the sacredness of the individual, and the individual’s relationship with others and with all physically oriented consciousness.

The crisis is a kind of therapy, however. It is a teaching method that you have set up for yourselves because you need it. And you need it now, before your species embarks upon journeys to other physical realities. You must learn your lessons now in your own backyard before you travel to other worlds. So you have brought this upon yourself for that purpose and you will learn. (End session at 11:55 P.M.)