“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.

“She sees herself supported in a religious sense by conventional figures from the Bible. These personalities will explain the nature of reality to her in vocabulary that will make sense to her. Again, she has solved the problems that she set, and brought forth in her husband compassion and understanding, qualities that greatly help in his own development.

“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.”

“China and Egypt. Lives in various religious capacities, but without the necessary sense of responsibility; unfortunately taking advantage of the fortunes made available to the ruling classes through the ages. For this reason, the abilities have not come to fruition. Only in this present existence is there finally some understanding, and sense of responsibility. In the past the psychic abilities were used for the wrong purposes; therefore, they did not fully develop and the personality was at a standstill.

“That’s what I mean,” Connie said. “I just could never make sense of it before. No one in my family ever died of diphtheria.”

“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.

“When I tell you that you lived, for example, in 1836, I say this because it makes sense to you now. You live all of your reincarnations at once, but you find this difficult to understand within the context of three-dimensional reality.

“Pretend that you have several dreams, and you know that you are dreaming. Within each dream, one hundred earthly years may pass, but to you, the dreamer, no time has passed, for you are free of the dimension in which time exists. The time you seem to spend within the dream—or within each life—is only an illusion, and to the inner self no time has passed because there is no time.”

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.”

Some people are better able to utilize past life experience, I think, while others insulate themselves rather closely in each life, closing themselves off as much as possible from such influences. Some people’s lives seem to make no sense, for instance, unless you know their “previous” ones. Our fifty- or sixty- or seventy-year life-spans are like self-contained novels, well plotted and executed.

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.

“So we find two lives devoted to the nurture of others. But in both cases the personality was filled with an inner dread, to some extent resenting those he helped. If he were out helping others, then who would mind the store? He was afraid his stock would be gone.

“In two other lives, there was instead the development of inner abilities to the exclusion of others, a closing down of windows and barring of doors. He would not look out, and no one dared look in. He would make horrible funny faces at the window of his soul to frighten others away. Yet through all of this, the inner abilities did grow. He ‘added to his stock.’

“Now he has begun to synthesize these inner and outer conditions. He realizes that the inner self need not be so heavily guarded, that his identity will not escape from him like a dog who leaves the leash. … Now, you see that I am a friendly chap, indeed, like an old dog with a long leash—”

“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.