“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.

(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.

(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.