“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.

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.

In the most simple of terms, you are deciding upon the environment. A violet springs to life in the backyard, but the violet must stay there. Its whole growth is dependent upon the weather conditions in that particular area, even though those conditions themselves result from overall planetary activity. You walk out of the place and time of your birth, however, as the flower cannot.

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.

The very practice of pinpointing the time of physical birth at conception itself errs. There is no point at which you can say in basic terms (underlined twice) that an individual is alive,² though you do find it more practical to accept certain points of life and death. It is true that you emerge into space and time at a certain point in your perception. Your consciousness has been itself long before, however.

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.

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

(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.

I admit that a birthday operates as a handy reference. But if you realized that your consciousness did exist before that time, your memory will open up, and your accepted birthdate will appear far less important. “Coming out of the womb” is an event, and much better to use than “birth.” In greater terms — far greater terms than you imagine — you are aware of probable “births,” and your other parentages [that are] quite as legitimate as the personal history you now accept.

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.

(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.

3. Jane and I appear to be two of those individuals “who follow a different order of probabilities” as far as astrology is concerned. Beyond some general reading we’ve done on the subject — both pro and con — we know little about it. However, horoscopes that readers have cast for us, after we’ve given the requested information about our births, seldom show much correlation with the Jane and Rob we think we know — nor will one person’s charts for us agree with those prepared by others. We’ve ended up feeling that astrology, as it’s presently practiced, is too limited in conception.