“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.

In the most simple of terms, you are deciding upon the environment. A violet springs to life in the backyard, but the violet must stay there. Its whole growth is dependent upon the weather conditions in that particular area, even though those conditions themselves result from overall planetary activity. You walk out of the place and time of your birth, however, as the flower cannot.

(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.

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.

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.

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

(10:17.) 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.

(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.”

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.

(Very intently:) In the same manner, the self knows ahead of time the best conditions for its own development, in light of the time and the place of its chosen birth. It has, however, literally endless probabilities to choose from, to fulfill its abilities while maintaining a workable selfhood.⁶ Consciousness chooses the best overall conditions available for its own purposes of growth. It then preconditions its own organism to respond or not to respond to the time and place of birth, to exaggerate or minimize, to negate or accept.

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.

I admit that a birthday operates as a handy reference. But if you realized that your consciousness did exist before that time, your memory will open up, and your accepted birthdate will appear far less important. “Coming out of the womb” is an event, and much better to use than “birth.” In greater terms — far greater terms than you imagine — you are aware of probable “births,” and your other parentages [that are] quite as legitimate as the personal history you now accept.

The personality itself is not only independent of space and time, but uses the illusions that result for its own purposes. All things are related, but they do not act in a certain way because the planets were such-and-such at your birth. There is a relationship, but it is not causal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seth has briefly referred to astrology a few times over the years. As an example, Appendix 21 contains the remarks he made in ESP class last November 26, 1974, concerning the “hidden variables” that can be associated with a recognized birthdate. For the moment, then, Jane and I think that Seth’s material on astrology in this 729th session (and, it soon developed, in the 730th) can serve as his answer to those who have asked for his opinion about it.

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.