“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.

(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.

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

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 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.

(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.

(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.