“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth rarely gives reincarnational data unless it is directly tied in with the overall development of an individual’s present life, and he refuses to give past life histories, for example, to those he thinks will not apply the lessons involved. Strangely enough, he did give such information once in a class to three college girls who clearly did not believe in reincarnation to begin with. They had just begun classes, and while they were curious about ESP, they had little patience with the theory of reincarnation—before the session, that is.

“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.

“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.

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.”

In fact, Seth gave three or four sessions in which he compared cases of “split” personalities to our reincarnation selves. He ended up by saying, “It is interesting that the personalities [in Three Faces of Eve] did alternate, and all were in existence at once, so to speak, even though only one was dominant at any given time. In the same way, so-called past personalities are present in you now but not dominant.”

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.

“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.”

Within this framework of development, however, there is a minimum requirement. Seth says: “As a rule, each entity is born so that three roles are experienced—that of mother, father, and child. Two lives would be sufficient to give you the three roles, but in some cases the personality does not function to adulthood. The most important issue, however, is the fullest use of potential.”