“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.”

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.

(Intently:) The ledge of 1940, however, is still as immediate and now and present as it was when you were born.

(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.

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.