“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The reincarnating personality enters the new fetus according to its own inclinations, desires, and characteristics, with some built-in safeguards. However there is no rule, then, saying that the reincarnating personality must take over the new form prepared for it either at the point of conception, in the very earliest months of the fetus’s growth, or even at the point of birth.

The process is gradual, individual and determined by experience in other lives. It is particularly dependent upon emotional characteristics — not necessarily of the last incarnated self, but the emotional tensions present as a result of a group of past existences.

In such a case, this is simply a regression that often passes. Here we become concerned again with the animus and the anima. If a personality believes that it is doing a poor job in a male life, it may activate the anima’s qualities, taking on the characteristics of a past female existence in which it handled itself well. Reversing the picture, the same can happen to a woman.

Those mentioned earlier who enter at the point of conception are usually highly anxious for physical existence. They will, therefore, be more fully developed and show their individual characteristics very early. They seize upon the new body and already mold it. The control over matter is vigorous, and they usually stay within the body, dying either in accidents where death is immediate or in sleep or with a disease that strikes quickly. They are manipulators of matter as a rule.

(10:48.) Because of their own characteristics, however, some prefer to set up a certain distance between themselves and their physical existences. They are much more concerned with symbols. They look upon earthly life as highly experimental. They approach it almost with a jaundiced eye, so to speak. They are not interested so much in manipulating matter as they are curious as to the ways in which ideas appear within matter.

Again generally speaking, they are always more at home with ideas, philosophies, and nontangible realities. They are thinkers always a bit apart, their body types showing a lack of muscular development. Poets and artists, while somewhat of this nature, as a rule are more deeply appreciative of the physical values of earthly existence, although they have many of the same characteristics.

The attitude toward the body will always vary, therefore. Various types of bodies may be chosen, but there will still be overall preferences on the part of the whole self, and characteristics that will lead the whole self, so that generally the various lives lived will still have their own individual flavor.

It is almost impossible to speak of when the personality enters the physical body without discussing the ways in which it leaves it, for all this is highly dependent upon personal characteristics and attitudes toward physical reality. Decisions as to future lives may be made not only in between-life conditions but also in dream states in any given life.