“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we lay in bed after last Monday’s session, Jane told me: “I’ve got it — from Seth, I think: A really complete astrological chart would have to include not only the time of your birth, but that of your death.” Which would pose a few obstacles, I thought as I fell asleep. …

(This evening, Jane had many thoughts and images before the session got under way. “It’s about astrology. Actually, I mean it’s about the birth of consciousness.”)

Dictation: Usually you think in terms of a hypothetical whole self or consciousness, emerging at birth and disappearing at death. There are, however, learned arguments in which professors debate such questions. Some astrologers use the time of conception in their calculations, while others prefer the date of birth. Various religions have decided that the “soul” enters the fetus at its conception, while others argue that consciousness cannot be considered a human soul until some time later, just prior to birth.

Give us a moment. (Long pause.) The chart of events at the time of your “birth” is like one small snapshot of someone’s backyard in the afternoon. Here in this analogy, the entire earthly personality could be compared to the world. Now as long as you make your deductions according to that one picture, there will be correlations that apply — but only to that small specific area.

In your terms, the person at birth is affected by multidimensional conditions, and the collective position of the planets is but one very minute indication of the other realities involved. Ruburt is correct: Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality, as well [as that of birth]. Your focus of attention forms boundaries that predispose you to believe in a point at which your consciousness emerges, as you understand it, and a point when it is no longer effective, or dies. Your beliefs in such concepts limit your perception, for by altering the focus of your attention you can to some extent become aware of perception before and after the recognized points of birth and death.

(10:02.) Give us a moment … But the body is a context that they have chosen to experience. In fulfilling themselves the cells aid your own existence, but in a framework they have chosen. They can reject certain elements within their existences, however, change their courses or even form new alliances. They have great freedom within what you think of as the framework of your reality. If their paths cannot be charted, and can indeed constantly surprise you, then why do you think that your course can be mapped out ahead of time by reading the positions of the stars at your birth?

I think it very likely that aborted fetuses and those infants who die early in “life” — say within a few months after birth, especially — never intended to stay long within camouflage (physical) reality to begin with; the consciousnesses within those small human structures came just to momentarily sample our world of matter, whether from inside the womb or out of it. Considering their viewpoints, it’s not tragic that they “die” unborn, or at such young ages, although in ordinary terms the parents involved will almost certainly mourn deeply. (Perhaps these notions will be of some limited comfort to those who have written us with related questions.)