“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night in ESP class Jane delivered a session that was long, forceful, dramatic, and humorous. Her energy was “up” for the whole evening. She also sang in Sumari, her trance language, after finishing with the session. Seth covered many interesting points, and [I can add later] Jane presents the entire session in slightly abbreviated form in Chapter 15 of Politics. I suggest the reader review that material at this time.

(4. Seth also said that it would be “not practical” and “boring” for him to relive his life as a pope, then added: “In those terms, many people do choose to reexperience what you would think of as a past existence in order to change it as they go along.” Yet this reexperiencing of a life is a different thing from the original one. Again in Seth Speaks, see Seth’s material at 10:07 in the 539th session for Chapter 10: “You may perfect [that past life], in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness — following — say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your ‘contemporaries.’”

(We discussed points 4 and 5 while waiting for the session to begin this evening. Just before Seth came through Jane said she had information on them — but that she didn’t have time to relay it to me. So I hoped her material would crop up in some form in the session itself.)

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.”

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.

Psychically you are somewhat related, in the same way for instance that the violets that grow this year in one spot are related to all violets that have grown — or will ever grow — from (or on) the same spot. Each moment, each year, has other dimensions, therefore, that you do not comprehend as yet. To you, other people born now in 1940 would be born in a probable reality. Yet you share the same bed, so to speak. When you look at an object you see its exterior, and when you experience time you perceive its exterior.

(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

(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.

If you think in conventional terms about reincarnation, then you might examine a book in which each page is a life. You read the book from the beginning, so you think of one life or page following another. You should be able to see that the entire book exists at once. But in larger terms it is just one volume that you, the greater psyche, are reading, told in terms of serial time.

Physically, the seeds of a plant fall onto the earth. They may be blown to some place distant from their birth, but the psyche’s “seeds” fly into other realities also. Within all of this, however, there is the finest balance between spontaneity and order. Violets do not grow in wintertime. Their characteristics appear only when certain conditions are met. So if you were born in 1940 you have no trouble keeping track of your own time, and you fulfill your life under the same general conditions as those in which you were born.

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.

(Finally, as we waited for Seth to return, Jane said: “Now I am confused — I can get material on three different subjects….” One was “Unknown” Reality. The other two were points 4 and 5, as listed in the notes preceding this session; since Jane became consciously aware of material on them just before the session began, she’d had no time in which to give it. “Now I’ll have to wait for things to sort themselves out,” she mused. It didn’t take long: Out of those very interesting ideas he’d mentioned in class last night, Seth ended up discussing the one I’ve noted as point 5.

Is the psyche then any less miraculous? And does not each of my readers possess the same innate capacity? You have within yourselves the same yearning for your own greatest flowering. You are multidimensional, however, so you grow in different kinds of realities, sending petals of yourself into other times and places, and you have the ability to mature in environments that are quite different one from the others.

(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.

You see the flower bulb as it exists from your own perspective. Yet, being multidimensional, you bloom in many other dimensions also. You have to walk around a plant on a table in order to see it from all sides. So, figuratively, walk around “time” to see yourself from all angles, and to perceive all of your manifestations.

The same kind of interrelationship occurs with each individual now alive, in your terms, whether or not conscious awareness is involved. Ruburt is exploring time as he probes the reality of his own psyche, then.

1. In the 13th session for January 6, 1964, Seth told us: “I will at a later date try to discuss the question of time. Any of these discussions are of necessity of a simple and uncomplicated nature. If I speak in analogies and images, it is because I must relate with the world that is familiar to you.” And, of course, Seth has been taking time to talk about time ever since. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality see, for instance, his opening delivery for Session 688: “These CU’s (or units of consciousness) therefore can operate even within time, as you understand it, in ways that are most difficult to explain. Time not only goes backward and forward, but inward and outward.”

2. Seth, in the 683rd session for Volume 1: “Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context (underlined) — portions of the self that are materialized in historical contexts.”

“When man realizes that he creates his own image now, he will not find it so startling to believe that he creates other images in other times. Only after such a basis will the idea of reincarnation achieve its natural validity, and only when it is understood that the subconscious, certain layers of it, is a link between the present personality and past ones, will the theory of reincarnation be accepted as fact. I have been prepared to give you this present information, but a suitable opportunity did not seem to present itself….”

4. In the 683rd session for Volume 1, see the flower, bulb, and time analogies given after 10:37.