“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) So the islands that I spoke about in our last session rose up from beneath the sea. Even as the dialogue of those islands took place, the islands themselves were changing. In somewhat the same way the psyche sends up counterparts of itself, each with different features or characteristics. As the physical properties of the earth distribute themselves in a certain given fashion about the surface of the planet, so do the properties of the earth-tuned psyches distribute themselves. Period.

Your present existence, however, is highly related to those other levels of selfhood. Now what happens at the top of the mountain affects all that goes on below, and so everything that you do affects those other realms of selfhood, and there is an interchange that occurs constantly. Physical conditions may be quite different in the valley, in the foothills of the mountain, and at its top. The very climate and vegetation may vary considerably, and yet all life and vegetation within the area are interrelated. Each layer of life that composes the mountain —

Now … Give us a moment … In many ways your language⁵ itself has a history that you do not understand.

There are languages that have nothing to do with words — or with thoughts as you understand them. Yet some of these communicate in a far more precise fashion.

This applies to the future as well as to the past. The body itself knows the source of water, for example, and food. Natives divorced from your technology do very well, as wild animals also do, in probing the life of the planet and their positions within it.

The fetus also understands that it can respond to a stimulus — to any stimulus it chooses — from a variety of probable futures. So do you unconsciously grope toward probable futures that to one extent or another beckon you onward.

To a future self no more illuminated than you are, you appear dead and lifeless — a dim memory. When you look out into the universe from your viewpoint, it seems as if you look into the past.⁸ Scientists tell you that when the light from every distant galaxy reaches you, the galaxy is already dead. In the same way, when you look “backward” into the psyche the life you may indistinctly view — the past life — is already vanished. Why is it that your scientists’ instruments do not allow them to look into the future instead, into worlds not yet born, since they operate so well in discerning the past? And why is it, with all of your ideas about reincarnation, there is precious little said about future lives?⁹

Jane knows she wrote the following poem early in 1964, but isn’t sure whether she did so before or after delivering the 18th session for Seth. As far as I’m concerned, at least, it hardly matters which came first; I like the poem as much as I do the session.

9. Seth’s point, that “there is precious little said about future lives,” is well taken. It’s one that Jane and I feel pretty much alone with; others don’t initiate the idea in discussions with us, for instance. In a very casual way lately I’ve been trying to tune in to a “future” existence so that I can do some writing and drawing about it, but haven’t made any meaningful contact so far.

One of the Roman soldiers, Maumee, and Nebene are mentioned in Appendix 21; see the excerpts there from the private session for November 18, 1974, as well as Note 1. Then see the comments Seth made the next evening in ESP class: “There are, of course, future memories as well as past ones … As Joseph often says: ‘When you think of reincarnation, you do so in terms of past lives.’ You are afraid to consider future lives because then you have to face the death that must be met first, in your terms. And so you never think of future lives, or how you might benefit from knowing them….”