“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.

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.

Other personalities, again, are being born “there,” but their season or reality is different than yours.

(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.) Time multiplies from within itself. When you think in terms of reincarnation, you are still dealing with very simple time concepts. You accept, if you were born in 1940, a particular historical sequence: but others born in 1940 (in a different season than your own), are born into a different historical context, a different 1940, with its own probable events. You always think of being reincarnated in terms of being born backward into a history of which you have read. But any given year has its own variations.²

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.

(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.