“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(4. Seth also said that it would be “not practical” and “boring” for him to relive his life as a pope, then added: “In those terms, many people do choose to reexperience what you would think of as a past existence in order to change it as they go along.” Yet this reexperiencing of a life is a different thing from the original one. Again in Seth Speaks, see Seth’s material at 10:07 in the 539th session for Chapter 10: “You may perfect [that past life], in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness — following — say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your ‘contemporaries.’”

(We discussed points 4 and 5 while waiting for the session to begin this evening. Just before Seth came through Jane said she had information on them — but that she didn’t have time to relay it to me. So I hoped her material would crop up in some form in the session itself.)

For our analogy, now, think of the various ledges or levels of the mountain as different time periods. It seems to you as if one reincarnational existence would be layered above the other. You may be able to see that those existences, like the mountain, would exist at once, but you might forget that there is endless creativity and change at all levels of the mountain. New vegetation grows at the bottom layers, for example, as well as at the top ones.

(Pause, one of many.) Time periods are natural and creative. They are like the levels of the mountain, bringing forth fresh life. They do not vanish when you are finished with your growth there, but serve as a growing media for other personalities.

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.

(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.

If you think in conventional terms about reincarnation, then you might examine a book in which each page is a life. You read the book from the beginning, so you think of one life or page following another. You should be able to see that the entire book exists at once. But in larger terms it is just one volume that you, the greater psyche, are reading, told in terms of serial time.

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.

(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.

(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

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.”

“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.