“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While in conventional terms you think of long centuries’ duration, in which finned creatures rose from the seas, some “becoming” reptiles and finally mammals, many did not make that journey but “fell” along the way. So in those terms, and following that analogy, the psyche makes the same kind of adjustments and life-changes. You have each existed many times, then, as fetuses “who did not make it.” Not necessarily because you did not want to be born, but because those experiences were in themselves legitimate,² and in your present state are written in the “memory” of your physical being.

(Intently at 9:36:) Now this does not mean that your personality as you know it was often trapped within a womb, destined to die there, or that a hypothetical whole self would not be born. It means that the archaeology of your psyche as it is physically focused carries those experiences. The self is not … (pause, eyes closed) … give us a moment; I am searching for a good analogy … the self is not like a clay figure coming from a potter’s oven, so that you can say: “Ah, here is a self, and nothing can be added to it.” You have always existed as a probable self, though you were not focused in the knowledge of your own experience.

At any point now you can literally become more yourself. In that regard, you are born by degrees. In certain terms you have discarded portions of yourself, so you died by degrees — but the two, the living and the dying, occur at once.

To a certain extent what you are was latent in the fetus, but there is no one point when “the full awareness of the soul enters into the flesh.” The process is gradual. In physical terms it begins before your own parents are born.