REINCARNATION AND COUNTERPARTS: THE “PAST” SEEN THROUGH THE MOSAICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Dictation. The next section (6) will be titled: “Reincarnation and Counterparts,” colon: “The ‘Past’ Seen Through the Mosaics of Consciousness.”

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.

Now: In somewhat the same manner, the self that you know is the mountain, and the rock layers forming it are past lives.

You are not any of those past selves, even though they are a part of the history of your being. They are themselves in their own space and time. They exist simultaneously with your own life, even as the strata of rock exist simultaneously with the mountain.

(Most emphatically:) In terms of time only, there is an archaeological meaning that is hidden within your own nature. To discover it you look “down” through the levels of your own being, there to find the layers of selfhood that in your world represent the past history of yourself, from which you emerged. You are not those selves psychically, however, any more than you are your mother’s or your father’s in physical terms. You are as different from those reincarnational selves, therefore, as you are from your parents, though you share certain backgrounds and characteristics.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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

Other related material on reprogramming the past can be found in Chapter 14 of Personal Reality; see sessions 653–55.

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….”

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….”