“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.

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 —

(“Is ‘life’ the word you want used there?” This is one of the few times I’ve interrupted Seth during his presentation of “Unknown” Reality.)

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.

(Pause.) When it rains, water rushes in great exuberant gushes down the sides of the mountain, bringing life and vitality to all of its parts. In somewhat the same way, your own experiences flow down and into the cracks and crevices of all the other times and centuries that compose your present lifetime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: