“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, at the time of the session Sally was in deep coma. She hadn’t been able to speak for over a year. First Seth gave a page or so of impressions, names, initials, events, and so forth, that he said he “derived from a certain portion of the girl’s consciousness—disjointed memories, thoughts, and ideas.

I had no idea whether or not Seth would come through that night. In the beginning, I’d jokingly introduced the minister as a rock drummer, to put both him and the class at ease. Someone commented that the presence of a minister must have quieted everyone down, since no one was saying much.

The girls were all intelligent, bright, alert—and wary. They weren’t about to be taken in by any mumbo jumbo. At the same time they were intensely interested in Seth’s ideas that consciousness can be expanded safely and without drugs, using his methods. One girl, Lydia, was the most vocal of the group in her arguments against reincarnation.

“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.

In the 256th session he said, “Because you are obsessed with the idea of past, present, and future, you are forced to think of reincarnations as strung out one before the other. Indeed we speak of past lives because you are used to the time sequence concept. What you have instead is something like the developments narrated in The Three Faces of Eve. You have dominant egos, all a part of an inner identity, dominant in various existences. But the separate existences exist simultaneously. Only the egos involved make the time distinction. 145 B.C., A.D. 145, a thousand years in your past, and a thousand years in your future—all exist now.”

As far as we know, this reconciliation of reincarnation and simultaneous time is original with Seth. Most other theories of reincarnation take the time sequence for granted. But what about cause and effect, then? When Seth introduced this idea, this is one of the first questions Rob and I thought of. Seth’s attitude toward cause and effect will become clear enough in his later explanations of the true nature of “time,” but when Rob first asked the question, Seth answered:

Some people, I’ve discovered, have the strangest ideas about mediums or psychics. When I first found this out, I used to knock myself out proving how normal I was. People usually found this very disappointing, and I found it very inhibiting. Now, most of this has just worn off. I’m as normal or abnormal as anyone else.

“They investigated the ideas, folklore, and officially held knowledge concerning botany and seed reproduction, and began behind the monastery their forbidden garden. They were trying to discover the secret of heredity within plant life.

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.