“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In each life you are meant to check the exterior environment in order to learn your inner condition. The outer is a reflection of the inner.

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.

There is an inner logic to your current relationships, attitudes, and experiences. If in one life, for example, you hated women, you may very well be a woman in the next life. Only in this way, you see, would you be able to relate to the experience of womanhood, and then as a woman face those attitudes that you yourself had against women in the past.

A chronically ill existence, for example, might also be a measure of discipline, enabling you to use deeper abilities that you ignored in a life of good health. The perfectly happy life for example, on the surface, may appear splendid, but it may also be basically shallow and do little to develop the personality.

The point I want to make is that the opportunity for development and knowledge is as present at this moment, in this life, as it will ever be. If you ignore day-by-day opportunities for development now, no one can force you to accept and utilize greater abilities after death, or between lives. The teachers are there in after-death experience, but there are also teachers here in your existence now.

Some families come together in a particular life not because of great attraction or love in a past existence, but for the opposite reason. Families may be composed, then, of individuals who disliked each other in the past and come together in a close relationship where they are to work together toward a common goal, learn to understand each other better, and work out problems in a different kind of context.

If you examine your own life now carefully, the challenges that you have set for yourself will become apparent. This is not easy to do, but it is within the grasp of each individual. If you release yourself from hatred, then you automatically release yourself from any such relationships in the future — or any experiences that are based upon hatred.

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.

On an unconscious basis, you are aware of the birth into physical life of someone you have known in the past. The strangers that you meet in your dreams are often, of course, people now alive — contemporaries — that you have also known in past lives.

There are also passing relationships, contacts made and then dropped. A mate from any given life, for example, may or may not represent someone with whom you have a deep abiding tie, and again you may marry someone because of highly ambiguous feelings from a past life, and choose a married relationship that is not based upon love, though love may emerge.

Others of a more placid nature will take their problems one at a time. Rest periods may also be taken, and they are highly therapeutic. For example, an excellent, satisfying life with a minimum of problems may be chosen either as a prelude to a life of concentrated challenge or as a self-adopted reward for a previous difficult life. Those that thoroughly enjoy the physical medium, without being obsessed by it, however, do very well indeed. The “laws” of reincarnation are adapted by the individual personalities to suit themselves.