“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Ican add later that this is the only session in the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality to be witnessed by someone other than myself: Our visitor was a young man I’ll call William Petrosky. He’s a member of Jane’s ESP class, lives in New York City, and was in Elmira a day early to conduct some personal business.

(For pretty obvious reasons as far as we’re concerned, Jane and I prefer that Seth hold his book sessions in private, although Seth himself is more flexible here than we are. But as Jane has said, things are “calmer” psychically when we’re by ourselves: In trance or out, she can concentrate upon the work at hand, free of the presence of a third individual — one who is bound to radiate his or her own psychic characteristics. Nor does it particularly matter if the witness remains silent; Jane still picks up elements of that “extra” personality, and reacts to them.

(Pause.) Dictation. Now: As soon as you label yourself you are setting limitations, putting up boundaries and defining the reality of your psyche — usually according to quite limited beliefs.

The idea of counterparts¹ somewhat shatters that old concept, yet you still want definitions for the self so that you know where you “stand.” You are so taken with the idea of labels that many follow astrology blindly. You are born at a certain time, at a certain place, under certain conditions — but consciousness always forms the conditions. If it is to some extent affected by those conditions, then, it is because the effects follow in the same way that a painter is affected by the landscape that he has himself created. So you decide to be born, say, in a certain month when the planets are thus-and-so. Ahead of time, you choose the seasons of your birth.

The word “season” here may be misleading. Give us a moment … Each year is like one ledge, however, bringing forth countless variations of the characteristic “flora” growing there. Each of those separate years, say, each of those 1940’s, or 1920’s, or 1950’s, carries on its own line of development. Time expands inwardly and outwardly in those terms — it does not just go forward.

Again: Your reality is like a shining platform, a surface resting upon probabilities. You follow these so unconsciously and beautifully, you swim through them so easily, that it does not occur to you to question your origin, or the medium in which your experience has its existence. All of those sharing any given birthdate, however, sharing even place as well as time, do not have the same “destiny”; but more, they do not share the same conditions necessarily. They are each affected by their own probability system at birth, and those conditions drastically alter the nature of their development.

Once you free your consciousness from limited concepts of time and self, then you can begin to explore the unknown reality that is the unrecognized self.

(10:17.) Now give us a moment … As the cells operate with the knowledge of probable actions and still maintain the physical body in your chosen system, so the psyche, operating in the same way, “seeds” itself in many different probabilities. In this case specifically, I am speaking of other physical probabilities — alternates, in other words, of the world as you know it. Those alive with you, your contemporaries, do not all belong to the same probable system. You are at a meeting ground in that respect, where individuals from many probable realities mix and merge, agreeing momentarily to accept certain portions of the same space-time environment.

Because you focus upon the similarities in experience, and play down the variances, then the oftentimes greater dissimilarities⁴ in so-called experience escape you completely. You take it for granted that memory is faulty if you do not agree with another person on the events that happened at a certain place and time — say those in a recently experienced historical past. You take it for granted that interpretations of events change, but that certain definite events occurred that are beyond alteration. Instead, the events themselves are not nearly that concrete. You accept one probable event. Someone else may experience instead a version of that event, which then becomes that individual’s felt reality.

All of this is fine theory, esoteric but hardly practical — unless you begin to question the nature of your own thoughts, and begin to explore the reality of those events that you seem to encounter.⁵

(10:25.) Give us a moment … (Pause.) Back to our flowers. Any wildflower on our mountain ledge (see the 728th session) will view the valley below from its own perspective, and see stretched about it the environment with which it is familiar. Generally speaking, the other flowers born in the same spring will die at about the same time. The next year the new flowers will see a slightly different landscape, yet the overall patterns will be the same. Violets will grow where there were violets before. The houses in the valley will be in the same “place.” If you looked at that same landscape one summer and then the next, you might say: “Ah, the violets always grow there, and it is good to see the lilies of the valley in the shadow of the same rock.” You might realize that the flowers you pick are not the same flowers that you picked last year at the same spot, but the very nature of your focus would cause you to concentrate upon those differences only when you were forced to. Otherwise you would think: “Violets are violets, and they are always here each spring.”

The vast unexplainable difference that exists as far as the flowers are concerned is something else again — for on that scale the flowers that you pick are utterly themselves in their own world, from which to a certain extent you have taken them.

Unimaginable differences would be present if those posies could see the same environment of the year before, and all of the minute variations that you ignore would be gigantic; different enough indeed so that at their level the flowers might think that a different kind of reality was involved. So there are variations, and highly significant probabilities, operating even between those born generally in the same month of the same year — not only in terms of exterior conditions, but of inward ones.

The shoot does not simply react to the direction from which the sun shines, but senses this far before, and the seed sensitizes itself “ahead of time” to those conditions. It could grow to the east just as well. The trigger is not the sun’s direction on its own, but the plant’s innate knowledge of that direction. The plant is not predestined to grow toward the west, for example.

(Very intently:) In the same manner, the self knows ahead of time the best conditions for its own development, in light of the time and the place of its chosen birth. It has, however, literally endless probabilities to choose from, to fulfill its abilities while maintaining a workable selfhood.⁶ Consciousness chooses the best overall conditions available for its own purposes of growth. It then preconditions its own organism to respond or not to respond to the time and place of birth, to exaggerate or minimize, to negate or accept.

The emergence of consciousness into those physical conditions automatically alters them — a fact not recognized by astrologers. Each child born alters the entire universe,⁷ and changes the world of its time and birth by bringing into it action not there earlier, in your terms, and by impressing the universe with the stamp — the indelible stamp — of its reality. Each child chooses its own probable version of any given birthdate. Such dates are obviously not just points in time, pinpointed in space. In the first place, since all time is simultaneous, you are always dying and being born, and your later experience affects the time of your birth.

The self is not limited. The true meaning of that statement may sometime dawn. The idea of one personhood still closes your eyes to the greater multipersonhood that is your true reality. Often your dreams give you a hint of this kind of existence.

Dictation: You view the heavens and the universe, the planets and the stars, from your own focus — a highly limited one in certain terms.

The personality itself is not only independent of space and time, but uses the illusions that result for its own purposes. All things are related, but they do not act in a certain way because the planets were such-and-such at your birth. There is a relationship, but it is not causal.

It is quite as true to say that the planets behave in a certain way because you are what you are, as it is to turn the statement around, as is generally done. The very positions of the planets and the stars are effects of the senses — perceptions that would have no meaning were it not for your own kind of consciousness. Those perceptions, then, cannot cause you to behave in any given way because of conditions that have no meaning outside of your own consciousness.

(Pause.) Now: The universe exists, but it takes the shape and form that you recognize only in your own perceptions. The motion of the planets, indeed their very perceived reality, exists in far different terms.

With physical perception the picture all fits, of course. You realize that someone — some interested observer — viewing the earth from another planet in another galaxy, would be seeing what you think of as earth’s past. But as I pointed out, “he” might also be seeing earth’s future,⁹ according to “his” viewpoint. This would in no way alter your reality. The positions of the stars and planets, however, and your time scheme, cannot be depended upon to give an indication of “causal” effects. The personality simply exists in greater terms.

I understand that some of this will be difficult to follow. The only other recourse, however, is to repeat myths and tales that you have outgrown. The stars and planets simply are in more than one place at one time. I admit that your perception of them makes them appear to be relatively stable, and you are biologically tuned in to that perception. Your experience of time and motion, as you know, is relative, and in comparison with your own relatively brief lives the planets seem to endure for almost endless periods. This is your viewpoint as you look out from your ledge.

(11:40.) Give us a moment … Other minute creatures might well mark portions of their lives with your coming and going, and imagine that your position at their birth regulated their activity. Imagine them making up charts correlating their lives with your own. Are you in the habit of pacing the floor? In another scale of time, how many ages might it seem to take for your shadow to cross from one side of the room to another? The analogy is not as farfetched as it may seem, for certainly your shadow will affect the temperature of the room minutely, and alter other conditions there in ways you would never comprehend, often causing gigantic variations to a consciousness on another scale.

An imaginary ant, a philosophical one, might sit and in its own way contemplate how often you walked the floor in a period that might seem like a year to it. It might try to calculate your next passage ahead of time, so that — prudent ant! — it could run “out of the way” in time to avoid your footsteps.

I am not comparing astrologers with ants. I am, however, trying to show you that you are not ruled by the stars — and that when you behave as if you are, then you are showing as little comprehension of your true position as our ant did. You are small in relationship to the stars, also, but when you seek to place your fate in their hands, figuratively speaking, then it does seem as if you have little control over your own destiny.

(Forcefully:) You are consciousnesses at particular points of experience, and in other kinds of reality you twinkle like stars.

Now, I am not going to tell you anything, and that always infuriates you and makes you happy at the same time. Instead, I give you methods that you can use to make your own reality by following your will (with humorous emphasis) as far as you want to; and because of this evening’s session and the energy involved, you have the opportunity for some splendid dream activity. You will have it whether or not you remember it, but I hope you can remember it. Do not hassle it.

2. See Note 1 for the 727th session; it contains references to two sessions on the fetus, as Jane excerpted them for The Seth Material. Now see the 557th session for Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks; Seth presented additional information on the various ways reincarnating personalities associate themselves with the fetus. And after 11:24 in the 688th session, for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, he talked about the present and future physical perceptions of the infant.

5. I think that in his material from 10:17 to 10:25 here, Seth very neatly summarizes much of his thinking about how each of us constantly moves through a multitude of probable realities, meeting certain others in any one space-time environment, perceiving individual versions of any given event … Very useful information. Jane and I try to keep it in mind.