“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … Time periods themselves, then, are somewhat like platforms — natural platforms — that serve “time and time again” to bring forth fresh life. Because of your viewpoint this is highly difficult [for you] to understand. Say you were born in 1940. It seems to you that 1940 is gone, though it was the time of your birth. Returning to our analogy, however: You are like one violet, born in one spring on one ledge, and we will call the ledge, here, 1940. Other people are being born in 1940 now, in a different “season.”

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.

(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.