“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … In your terms, the land changes through the ages. Mountains and islands arise, then disappear, to reemerge in new form. The oceans rise and fall also, and in some cases the floor of the ocean becomes the surface of the planet, only to be covered again by water. Yet through all of these changes the earth retains a landscape, and at any given time the features of the land are quite dependable and permanent enough for your purposes.

(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.

Like the mountain, therefore, you have a history in terms of the present that is yours, and yet not yours. It does not control you, for you alter it with each thought and action, even as each motion at the mountain’s top affects its base. The layers at the bottom, however, are also constantly changing, so that the whole area is a gestalt of relatedness.

The past is obviously built into words in terms of time. When you speak a given word you may not know the history of its changes through the years, yet you speak it perfectly. You seldom realize that the present state of your language, whatever it is, will for others someday seem to be an archaic version. In whatever terms, again, you think of yourselves as being at the top of the mountain. In your terms, language presupposes a particular kind of development of mind, and when you think of language you tie the two together.

“To your way of thinking, some lives are lived in a twinkling (in various systems), and others last for centuries. The perception of consciousness is not limited, however. I have told you, for example, that trees have their own consciousness. The consciousness of a tree is not as specifically focused as your own, yet to all intents and purposes, the tree is conscious of 50 years before its existence, and 50 years hence. Its sense of identity spontaneously goes beyond the change of its own form. It has no ego to cut the ‘I’ identification short. Creatures without the compartment of the ego can easily follow their own identity beyond any change of form.”