“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth had often told us that when we’re finished with our lives here, we’re actually anxious to leave this existence. When the body is worn out, we really want to get rid of it. The instinct for survival is served quite well, because the inner self knows that it lives beyond death. Still, I hated to say this to Jon over the phone. In theory it sounded fine, but naturally I knew he wanted Sally to live. I knew that he hoped for some miracle—at least a partial recovery, a reprieve.

“There have been guides to help her. She will hardly notice that she has entirely moved in, for she will feel so at home. In her case, she has been forming memory pictures of her childhood, of days before her physical illness, and entering into them. She is learning that events that seem to be in the past can be re-created.

“Shortly, training periods will begin. It will be her turn now to help others and be their source of strength. She has already begun a new life, therefore [Seth does not mean another physical life here, of course], though presently her experience is being monitored to some degree by guides.

During our break, Rob mentioned several questions that he thought Jon would like answered, or that might come to his mind as he read the session. One had to do with the kind of body Sally had at her disposal. Seth said, “Now the new body is, of course, not a new one at all, but simply a body not physical in your terms, one that you use in astral projections, one that gives the vitality and strength to the physical body that you know.

“Your flesh is embedded in it now. When you leave the physical body, the other body is quite real to you and seems as physical, although it has many more freedoms. … Sally is delighted with this body, comparing it with the [sick] physical one. She is trying to cut off all identification with her physical body, whether it is alive or dead in your terms.

“When we leave the physical body, where do we go?” the minister asked. Everyone else sat about, sipping wine and listening.

“You must understand the nature of reality before you can manipulate within it well. In physical reality you are learning that your thoughts have reality, and that you create the reality that you know. When you leave this dimension, then you concentrate upon the knowledge you have gained. If you still do not realize that you create your own reality, then you return, and again you learn to manipulate, and again and again you see the results of your own inner reality as you meet it objectified. You teach yourself the lesson until you have learned it; then you begin to learn how to handle the consciousness that is yours, intelligently and well. Then you can form images for the benefit of others, and lead and guide them. Then you constantly enlarge the scope of your understanding.”

“Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses. They force you to perceive action in certain terms, but this is not the nature of action. The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists and is gone forever, and the next moment comes and like the one before also disappears.

“There is no past, present, and future. These only appear to those who exist within three-dimensional reality. Since I am no longer in it, I can perceive what you do not. There is also a part of you that is not imprisoned within physical reality, and that part of you knows that there is only an Eternal Now. The part of you who knows this is the whole self.

So while Seth often explains present life problems as the result of past life difficulties, he makes it clear to those that can understand that the lives really exist simultaneously, just as three personalities can exist in one body at one time. But all problems are not the result of such “past life” influences. In one case, a friend’s hang-ups in the present originated right in this life, though her boyfriend’s were left over from the past.

Much more psychological advice was given. The whole session was of great help to Doris—who hasn’t been frightened of Seth since, by the way! But it is an oversimplificaton to say that all present problems are the result of past life difficulties. We are not “stuck” with our problems, whether they come from this life or another. We don’t have to drag them along with us. They can be solved, and while reincarnational influences certainly operate, they don’t operate in a vacuum. The following chapter on health will contain some of Seth’s methods for maintaining mental, psychic, and physical vitality—and perspective.

My eyes were open during much of the session—my physical eyes, that is, because at such times they are definitely mirrors of a different personality. “There has been a sense of a void to be filled,” Seth began. “A fear of identity escaping and running outward. My cup runneth over, and there will be none of me left—you see? On the other hand it has always been natural for the personality to turn outward in an easy manner and with exuberance.

“Three villagers were hunting on monastery ground. You yelled out to tell them that they trespassed, and tripped on a rock. You were knocked unconscious, and the townspeople ran. You came to at night, and wandered through the fields on the far side of the monastery, and came to a body of water. You knelt and began to pray and lost your balance. You grabbed hold of an overhanging branch, but it gave way, and you drowned.”

I’ve tried, through excerpts from readings, to show Seth’s ideas on reincarnation as they are personally applied. But there are several important questions we haven’t considered as yet. For example, how many lives do we live? Is there a limit to them? Quite simply, we live as many physical existences as we feel we must in order to develop our abilities and prepare ourselves to enter other dimensions of reality. This will be discussed thoroughly in the chapter dealing with the nature of personality.

Seth also told us that some personalities do not develop well in the physical environment, but fulfill themselves in other realities. In other words, the “last” reincarnation is not the end. There are other dimensions of existence in which we have an even greater part to play in the maintenance of life and consciousness. These dimensions, and our part in them, will be explained along with the God concept, probabilities, and time. But central to Seth’s discussions of reincarnation are the following excerpts from session 233 that place reincarnation in perspective, individually and historically.

“Learning to some extent is passed on through the genes, biochemically, but this is a physical materialization of inner knowledge achieved and retained from past lives. … The human being does not … erupt into existence at birth and laboriously then begin its first attempt to gain experience. If this were the case, you would still be back in the Stone Age.

“There are waves of energy, and waves of reincarnational patterns, for there have been many Stone Ages on your planet, where new identities did begin their ‘first’ experience with physical existence, and changed the face of the earth as they progressed. …

“For as many layers of the self compose the whole self [entity], so many entities form a gestalt of which you know relatively little and of which I am not as yet prepared to tell you.” (This last remark was to lead, much later, into whole blocks of sessions dealing with the God concept.)