“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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 shoot does not simply react to the direction from which the sun shines, but senses this far before, and the seed sensitizes itself “ahead of time” to those conditions. It could grow to the east just as well. The trigger is not the sun’s direction on its own, but the plant’s innate knowledge of that direction. The plant is not predestined to grow toward the west, for example.

It is quite as true to say that the planets behave in a certain way because you are what you are, as it is to turn the statement around, as is generally done. The very positions of the planets and the stars are effects of the senses — perceptions that would have no meaning were it not for your own kind of consciousness. Those perceptions, then, cannot cause you to behave in any given way because of conditions that have no meaning outside of your own consciousness.

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.

6. See the 565th session as it’s continued in Chapter 16 of Seth Speaks. Seth talked about the myriad probable actions available to any self. After 10:19: “To the extent that you are open and receptive, you can benefit greatly by the various experiences of your probable selves … often what seems to you to be an inspiration is a thought experienced but not actualized on the part of another self … Ideas that you have entertained and not used may be picked up in this same manner by other probable you’s. Each of these probable selves considers itself the real you, of course, and to any one of them you would be the probable self; but through the inner senses each of you are aware of your part in this gestalt.”