“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You think that the self must begin or end someplace. There must be a fence around it, a yard of identity in which you can feel safe. I have said many times that there are no limitations to the self. You seem to be afraid that the self will bleed out and lose “itself” in a maze in which all identity is lost. Yet you recognize that your self is a far greater dimension than you usually suppose, so you speak in terms of reincarnation. This allows you to imagine greater realms of identity while still holding your concepts of selfhood intact. You think of being one self after another, each identity being neatly separated from the others by a passage of years, an obvious death and an obvious birth.

Say, again, that the year is 1940. All of those born on a particular date in 1940 will not necessarily be born “at the same time” at all. What you think of as 1940 is but one season on that ledge, the season that you recognize. Flowers from the spring of one year “do not see” or mix with the flowers of the following spring, or with those of the spring before. In the same way, those born in 1940 “at one season” do not, in a greater context, mix with those born in the same year either.

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.

Consciousness, being active within all cellular structures, triggers itself ahead of time [in each case], so to speak, to react to certain conditions and not to others. Many are born the same day of any given year, and generally within the same time period — but individually the inner triggering may be far different, so that while the overall conditions at birth may appear more or less the same, the inner reactions to them will vary widely. Period.

Some persons will be much more affected by, and sensitive to, other probabilities — which, for instance, do not show at all in conventional astrological “charts.”

Those charts emphasize one line of probabilities at the expense of all others. Interpretations based upon the charts then will make more sense to those who have chosen the same probable birth circumstances — but they will be of no value to those who were born at the same time, in your terms, but who follow a different order of probabilities.³

(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.

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

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.

I am not even hinting at predestination or predetermination. Let us try another simple analogy. A seed “knows” that it will come to life in the middle of a pot in someone’s living room. Say it is a tomato seed, and our house owner decides to start a plant from scratch. All cellular life is precognitive, in your terms. The seed then knows that the sun comes, say, from the west in this particular room. It begins to respond in that manner before the shoot emerges.

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 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.

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.

Your rumbling tread might shake its tiny home beneath certain floorboards, or in the crevices between. I admit that I am stretching our ant tale here, but imagine further that our little fellow becomes familiar with everyone in, say, an apartment house, learning to recognize all of the footsteps that go up and down the stairs. Our philosopher keeps in touch with the other ants, until with time and work and patience, a chart is made and calculations drawn. An ant born at three o’clock in the afternoon, when Miss X comes home with her boyfriend, is apt to have a hard time of it — for the couple runs about exuberantly, shaking all of the establishment, and tumbling the dust in the inner crevices.