“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.’”

While mountains generally maintain a more or less permanent position, in your terms, the vegetation that grows on the different levels changes. New flowers come each spring. You may always find a patch of violets in the same general position in the foothills each year, for example; yet they are not the same violets that grew last season, or that will appear next season.

The pattern for those flowers serves to seed each new batch. All kinds of alterations also take place in the soil beneath the mountain’s layers. So, while different ledges may appear more or less the same, this sameness is the result of minute changes, new growths and seasonal variations.

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.

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.

(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

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.