“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

(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.

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.