“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.”

(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.

As a physical being, your beliefs and concepts form your reality. The psyche from which your identity springs is free of the picture of reality that you have chosen. Period. You choose, in other words, to accept a given picture of the world, and you use that picture as a frame within which you form a life.

(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.