“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(For pretty obvious reasons as far as we’re concerned, Jane and I prefer that Seth hold his book sessions in private, although Seth himself is more flexible here than we are. But as Jane has said, things are “calmer” psychically when we’re by ourselves: In trance or out, she can concentrate upon the work at hand, free of the presence of a third individual — one who is bound to radiate his or her own psychic characteristics. Nor does it particularly matter if the witness remains silent; Jane still picks up elements of that “extra” personality, and reacts to them.

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.

(9:29.) Now: In greater terms, probabilities operate to an extent you may not suspect. For one thing, any focus point of physical life is caused by a merging of probabilities. Our session is being witnessed by a student, a most intelligent young man (humorously). He also helps Ruburt with correspondence. Earlier tonight he wrote to a woman who has the same birthdate as Ruburt. In our last session I compared a year to a ledge on a mountain. I said that the seasons came and went, and that many crops of spring flowers grew there over a period of time. So each year, in those terms, is like a ledge.

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.

The word “season” here may be misleading. Give us a moment … Each year is like one ledge, however, bringing forth countless variations of the characteristic “flora” growing there. Each of those separate years, say, each of those 1940’s, or 1920’s, or 1950’s, carries on its own line of development. Time expands inwardly and outwardly in those terms — it does not just go forward.

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

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.

These events may be quite different indeed, and the separate interpretations make quite valid explanations of separate variations. In your terms, one event can happen in many different ways.

(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.

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.

Dictation: You view the heavens and the universe, the planets and the stars, from your own focus — a highly limited one in certain terms.

In the first place you are looking at one version of the universe, as it seems to exist at the moment of your perception. The entire nature of a personality cannot be considered in its totality in that small context.

I understand that some of this will be difficult to follow. The only other recourse, however, is to repeat myths and tales that you have outgrown. The stars and planets simply are in more than one place at one time. I admit that your perception of them makes them appear to be relatively stable, and you are biologically tuned in to that perception. Your experience of time and motion, as you know, is relative, and in comparison with your own relatively brief lives the planets seem to endure for almost endless periods. This is your viewpoint as you look out from your ledge.

(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.

An imaginary ant, a philosophical one, might sit and in its own way contemplate how often you walked the floor in a period that might seem like a year to it. It might try to calculate your next passage ahead of time, so that — prudent ant! — it could run “out of the way” in time to avoid your footsteps.

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.

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.

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.”

9. See Session 712 at 9:40. The whole of Seth’s first delivery for that session can supplement his data in this one. Also refer to his concluding paragraphs (after 10:52) for the 727th session.