“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A mountain is composed of many layers of rock that serve, as you think of it, as its foundation. The top of the mountain represents the present to you, and the tiers of rock beneath stand for the past. The mountain itself is not any one of those rock layers that seemingly compose it, however. There is a relationship between the mountain and those strata but the term “mountain” is one that you have applied. In greater terms the mountain and all of its components exist at once, of course. You can examine the various levels of rock structure. Geologists can tell when, in terms of time, certain sedimentary deposits formed. The rocks themselves still exist in the geologists’ present time, or they could not make such an examination. The mountain would not be a mountain without that “foundation.” Again, however, it is not any one of those rock layers.

The fetus itself, before its conception, responds to a self not yet physically apparent; and the future, in those terms, draws new life from the past. A reality of selfhood, an idea not yet materialized in the unformed future, reaches down into the past and brings that future into realization. The cells are imprinted with physical information in terms of space and time,³ but those data came from a reality in which space and time are formed.

A simple tree deals with the nature of probabilities as it thrusts forward into new seeds. Computations go on constantly within it, and that communication involves an inner kind of language innocent of symbols and vowels. The tree knows its present and future history,⁷ in your terms, but it understands a future that is not preordained. It feels its own power in the present as it constructs that future. In deeper terms the tree’s seeds also realize that there is a future there — a variety of futures toward which they grope.

(10:52.) You choose your futures, but you also choose your pasts. There is only so much that I can say, since I am using a verbal language that in itself makes a tyrant of time. This book is paced in such away, however, that if you follow it an inner language will be initiated. This in itself annihilates your stereotyped concepts and releases you from time’s dictatorship. Some of the exercises to be given in this section will be geared to that purpose.

An archaeologist or a geologist examining “old” rock strata will find dead fossils, just as from your viewpoint you will discover “dead” past lives as you look “downward” through your psyche. You will seem to view finished reincarnational existences, even as from his present the geologist will discover only inanimate fossils embedded in rock. Those fossils are still alive, however. The geologist is simply not tuned in to their life area. So reincarnational lives are still occurring, but they are a part of your being. They are not you, and you are not your reincarnational past.

“A tree knows human beings also … by the vibrations in the air as they pass, which hit the tree’s trunk from varying distances, and even by such things as voices. The tree does not build up an image of man, but a composite sensation which represents an individual. And the same tree will recognize the same person who passes it by each day….”

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.

But no sound can break

One might say that Seth continued his own tree data almost five years later, in the 453rd session for December 4, 1968. Jane presented that rather brief session in full in the Appendix for The Seth Material, but from it I’d like to quote these lines:

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.

I’ve become quite interested in such an achievement in view of my recent but very limited successes in touching upon several personal “past” involvements: the two nameless Roman soldiers, and the woman called Maumee. The idea of trying to reach a future self has been with me for some three and a half years, though, or since I first encountered Nebene, that male personality who inhabits a distant niche in my psychic past.