“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are convinced that you cannot see the future, and this means — in terms of our analogy, at least — that you cannot look upward beyond your own time. While that is the case, you will always think of reincarnation as occurring in the past.

(Very definitely at 10:02:) Think instead of strata of being, each simultaneously occurring. Physically the human fetus bears a memory of its “past.”¹ In your terms, it travels through the stages of evolution before attaining its human form. It attains that form, however, because it responds to a future time,² a future self not as yet physically created.

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.

The knowledge of probabilities⁴ brings forth present time and reality. Voices speak through the genes and chromosomes that connect the future and the past in a balance that you call the present form. The history of the private psyche and the mass experience of the species, again, resides in each individual. The archaeology of the past and the future alike is alive within the layers of consciousness that compose your being.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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

The answer is that your language is limited. Your verbal language — for your biological communication is quite aware of probable future events, and the body constantly maintains itself amid a maze of probabilities.

In Appendix 12 and its notes there are a number of passages from Seth (as well as a few of my own) that supplement his remarks, in this 727th session, on present form responding to a future time. See, for instance, the quotations from the 690th session in Volume l; Seth discussed the ability of our species to precognitively alter the present from the future. Molecular biology and precognition are also referred to. Then see Note 17 for Appendix 12, wherein biological precognition and the cellular manipulation of probabilities are mentioned.

3. In the 684th session for Volume 1, Seth came through with one of my favorite statements (even if it is grammatically incorrect): “The cells precognate.” Much of his material in that session applies here: “It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past….”

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.

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….”