“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(5. To class members: “You are yourself. I am myself. I am not Ruburt. Ruburt is not me. Ruburt is me. I am myself … You are death and you are life … Ruburt can do many things that surprise me — that I did not do in my past, for remember that fresh creativity emerges from the past also, as in [Ruburt’s novel] Oversoul Seven. My memory does not include a predetermined past in which Ruburt exists. He can do things that did not happen in my memory of that existence, and did not, in fact, occur.” [And added later: I quoted the last three lines in Appendix 18 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.]

You are only aware of your own position within time, or your own place on the “platform,” or the ledge as you understand it.¹ Not only do these ledges or platforms of time exist simultaneously, but each one brings forth its own batches of personalities in its own different seasons. To that degree you are aware of your own season only, and we will call it the physical one — the particular probable reality that you accept as real.

Other personalities, again, are being born “there,” but their season or reality is different than yours.

Psychically you are somewhat related, in the same way for instance that the violets that grow this year in one spot are related to all violets that have grown — or will ever grow — from (or on) the same spot. Each moment, each year, has other dimensions, therefore, that you do not comprehend as yet. To you, other people born now in 1940 would be born in a probable reality. Yet you share the same bed, so to speak. When you look at an object you see its exterior, and when you experience time you perceive its exterior.

(9:43.) Give us a moment … The year 1940, then, continues to exist as the mountain ledge continues to exist, and it brings forth new creativity “each season.” The violets on our hypothetical mountainside contribute to the life of the mountain even while they have their own independent reality, and the overall cycle of the seasons regulates the growth and development of the mountain and all of its manifestations.

(Pause.) Time multiplies from within itself. When you think in terms of reincarnation, you are still dealing with very simple time concepts. You accept, if you were born in 1940, a particular historical sequence: but others born in 1940 (in a different season than your own), are born into a different historical context, a different 1940, with its own probable events. You always think of being reincarnated in terms of being born backward into a history of which you have read. But any given year has its own variations.²

(Most emphatically:) In a way you seed yourself into time. But you could choose to be born five “times” in 1940, and each existence would be entirely separate, as you probed into the probable realities existing for you in the variations of that period.

As a physical being, your beliefs and concepts form your reality. The psyche from which your identity springs is free of the picture of reality that you have chosen. Period. You choose, in other words, to accept a given picture of the world, and you use that picture as a frame within which you form a life.

Instead, you are not only reading but writing many such books of living experience, that represent existences. Creativity is endless, and the psyche is the greatest source of creativity. Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters — and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. That is a truer picture of your position.

Physically, the seeds of a plant fall onto the earth. They may be blown to some place distant from their birth, but the psyche’s “seeds” fly into other realities also. Within all of this, however, there is the finest balance between spontaneity and order. Violets do not grow in wintertime. Their characteristics appear only when certain conditions are met. So if you were born in 1940 you have no trouble keeping track of your own time, and you fulfill your life under the same general conditions as those in which you were born.

Cells retain their shape and integrity, and their position more or less within your organs, although the atoms and molecules within them change. The overall pattern continues, however, so that your body retains its familiarity even as, in other terms, the mountain maintains its form. The cells serve as patterns of development on the one hand, through which atoms and molecules express their being. Each category is dependent upon the others. So your own consciousness follows a certain line of development that is its own, and that recognizes its own “seasons.” Other offshoots of yourself, in your terms, operate following their own orders in times quite apart from your own.

(Finally, as we waited for Seth to return, Jane said: “Now I am confused — I can get material on three different subjects….” One was “Unknown” Reality. The other two were points 4 and 5, as listed in the notes preceding this session; since Jane became consciously aware of material on them just before the session began, she’d had no time in which to give it. “Now I’ll have to wait for things to sort themselves out,” she mused. It didn’t take long: Out of those very interesting ideas he’d mentioned in class last night, Seth ended up discussing the one I’ve noted as point 5.

Is the psyche then any less miraculous? And does not each of my readers possess the same innate capacity? You have within yourselves the same yearning for your own greatest flowering. You are multidimensional, however, so you grow in different kinds of realities, sending petals of yourself into other times and places, and you have the ability to mature in environments that are quite different one from the others.

(Pause.) In terms of your reality only, however, you seem to come to bloom through the seasons of the earth, and in your terms only, through consecutive periods. You are like a flower bulb that each time gives birth to a different blossom, while still conforming to certain overall patterns — but each blossom is entirely new. Because you think in terms of time sequences, it is natural for you to think of your psychic lineage in the same way. Each flowering of the bulb, however, brings about a different expression. You were not your past “self,” therefore, though you shared a certain relationship. Period.

You see the flower bulb as it exists from your own perspective. Yet, being multidimensional, you bloom in many other dimensions also. You have to walk around a plant on a table in order to see it from all sides. So, figuratively, walk around “time” to see yourself from all angles, and to perceive all of your manifestations.

(10:52.) Give us a moment … In certain terms, for instance, I am a future of Ruburt, but the “past” is always freshly creative. Ruburt’s life as he knows it is not in my memory — because I did different things when I was Ruburt. And he is not bound by that reality that was mine.

(Leaning forward, speaking intently but half-humorously:) I have memories of being Ruburt — but the Ruburt I was is not the Ruburt that Ruburt is in his reality. He surprises me, and his reactions alter my past. In his terms I am a future self, with far greater knowledge, yet he uses that knowledge to alter his present reality; and when I was Ruburt I did not have that knowledge. You can say then that I am altering my own past, but Ruburt’s present experience also changes my present experience — and so there is an unending interchange.⁵

The same kind of interrelationship occurs with each individual now alive, in your terms, whether or not conscious awareness is involved. Ruburt is exploring time as he probes the reality of his own psyche, then.

You must begin any study from your own viewpoint, from your own ledge, but your personal living experience is always the main source of information. Within you as you know yourself are all of the hints you need, if you are but willing to follow them; and these will not destroy the fabric of physical reality, but instead show you more clearly the structure of its miraculous patterns.

(11:01. But hardly of the session. Once again, following his recent custom, Seth delivered several additional pages of material on topics not connected to “Unknown” Reality. End at 11:30 P.M.)

1. In the 13th session for January 6, 1964, Seth told us: “I will at a later date try to discuss the question of time. Any of these discussions are of necessity of a simple and uncomplicated nature. If I speak in analogies and images, it is because I must relate with the world that is familiar to you.” And, of course, Seth has been taking time to talk about time ever since. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality see, for instance, his opening delivery for Session 688: “These CU’s (or units of consciousness) therefore can operate even within time, as you understand it, in ways that are most difficult to explain. Time not only goes backward and forward, but inward and outward.”

In the 82nd session for August 27, 1964: “When man realizes that he himself creates his personal and universal environment in concrete terms, then he can begin to create a private and universal environment much superior to the one that is the result of haphazard and unenlightened constructions.

“When man realizes that he creates his own image now, he will not find it so startling to believe that he creates other images in other times. Only after such a basis will the idea of reincarnation achieve its natural validity, and only when it is understood that the subconscious, certain layers of it, is a link between the present personality and past ones, will the theory of reincarnation be accepted as fact. I have been prepared to give you this present information, but a suitable opportunity did not seem to present itself….”

5. Point 5 at the start of this session contains my note that later I added to Appendix 18 a few of the comments Seth made in last night’s ESP class, concerning his connections with Jane. Seth obviously elaborated on that material here, but instead of quoting it in Appendix 18 also, I thought of letting the reader first come across it in this session; and so, to whatever tiny extent, this additional information now alters each reader’s present reality by changing his or her conception of that Jane-Ruburt-Seth relationship.