“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward. As this is done, the exterior circumstances should change for the better as the inner self becomes more aware of its own nature and capabilities. Theoretically, then, in each life you would become stronger, healthier, wealthier, and wiser, but it does not work that way, for many reasons. As mentioned earlier, many personalities adopt different kinds of experiences, focusing upon development in certain specific areas, and ignoring others perhaps for a series of lives.

No consciousness has the same experiences or interprets them the same, and so each individual utilizes reincarnational opportunities in his own way. Sex changes, for example, are necessary. Some individuals alternate their sex in each (succeeding) life. Others have a series of female lives and then a series of male lives, or vice versa, but the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences.

Abilities cannot be developed following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood. When you get to the point that you realize you are forming your day-to-day existence and the life that you know, then you can begin to alter your own mental and psychic patterns, and therefore change your daily environment.

(9:25.) This realization, however, should go hand in hand with a deep intuitional knowledge of the capabilities of the inner self. These two factors together can release you from any difficulties that have arisen in past lives. The entire structure of your existence will begin to change with these realizations, and an acceleration of spiritual and psychic growth will develop.

(9:35.) Illness is often the result of ignorance and lazy mental habits. Such a discipline may be adopted however by certain personalities who must take strong measures with themselves because of other characteristics. There is an overall pattern to relationships within lives, and yet this does not mean that you travel through various existences with the same limited and familiar number of friends and acquaintances, merely altered like actors with a change of face or costume.

Jointly, each generation has its own purpose. It is this — to perfect inner knowledge, and to materialize it as faithfully as possible outward into the world. The changing physical scene throughout the centuries, as you know them, represents the inner images that have flickered through the minds of the individuals who lived within the world through the various ages.

Knowing your reincarnational background, but not knowing the true nature of your present self, is useless. You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, “This is because of something I did in a past life,” for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences. You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.