“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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

(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.”

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.

Consciousness does not simply choose to be born at a certain place in space and time, but it also endows its physical organism ahead of time with certain inner triggers so that it will respond to those conditions in highly individualistic ways.

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.

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.