“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.

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.

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.

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.