“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

(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.

Give us a moment … The universe is seeded with various kinds of consciousnesses. Some of these appear to you as planets or stars,⁸ as they “intrude” into your field of actuality. As such they appear to behave in a certain fashion, to take a certain form, to have certain effects. You and the stars are simultaneous events, each conscious and aware but in different “scales” of actuality — as your scale of consciousness is different from that of the violets.

(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.

(Forcefully:) You are consciousnesses at particular points of experience, and in other kinds of reality you twinkle like stars.