“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Time expands in all directions, and away from any given point.⁸ The past is never done and finished, and the future is never concretely formed. You choose to experience certain versions of events. You then organize these, nibbling at them, so to speak, a bit “at a time.”

Each identity has free will, and chooses its environment as a physical stance in space and time. Those involved in a given century are working on particular problems and challenges. Various races do not simply “happen,” and diverse cultures do not just appear. The greater self “divides” itself, materializing in flesh as several individuals, with entirely different backgrounds — yet with each embarked upon the same kind of creative challenge.

Each will choose his or her own framework, according to the intents of the consciousness of which each of you is an independent part. In such a fashion are the challenges and opportunities inherent in a given “time” worked out.

(Jane’s own counterpart material included variations of Seth’s basic concept. Here’s one of her examples as she described it to me: “We can span a period like a century if we want to. We can be a child at one end of it and an old man or woman at the other … Michelangelo [who lived for 89 years, from 1475 to 1564] decided to span a century himself instead of as three counterparts, say. Since there aren’t any laws about all of this, a great man could choose to do it that way in order to affect our world more with his gifts, from his own personal angles. He wouldn’t necessarily want or need the counterparts, at least for those purposes. He’d have more than enough to offer on his own.”