“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … Selfhood overspills with great luxurious outcroppings, yet you jealously guard against such creativity. To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes,¹ which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible — one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before. As Ruburt recently suspected, some very old cultures have been aware of this.² Period. While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods. This does not mean that the individual self was less, but was more aware of its own reality. A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

(Pause.) The human body would be used in earth’s great husbandry as, from it, dying and decaying new forms would arise. This was a give-and-take in which, for instance, a jungle neighborhood was truly home, and all was a portion of the self psychically, spiritually, and physically.⁴

(With emphasis:) I am not saying, for example, that the living consciousness of each individual returned to the earth literally, but that the physical material permeated and stamped with that consciousness did, and does. Again, even the cells retain knowledge of all of their affiliations. In physical terms the consciousness that you understand is based upon this.

To that extent the so-called past experience of your ancestors and of your species is concurrent with your own, biologically speaking. That is but one line, however, covered by the chromosomes. You have “another line” of existence that also serves as a support for the one that you presently recognize. It includes other interweaving physical relationships that bind you with all others upon your planet at the same adjacent level of time. That is, to some extent or another you are related to all of those alive upon the planet. You are time contemporaries. You will have a far closer relationship with some than with others. Some will be your counterparts.

Here also ideas of time hamper you, for I must explain all of this in temporal terms. Since time is simultaneous, at other levels your ancestors knew of your birth though they died centuries ago in recognized continuity. The same applies to reincarnational existences that you think of as occurring in the past.

All of the leaves now growing on this plant could be thought of as counterparts of each other, each alive and individual in one time, each contributing yet facing in different directions. As one leaf falls another takes its place, until next year the whole plant, still living, will have a completely new set of leaves — future reincarnational selves of this batch.

The larger self, then, seeds itself in time. In this process no identity is lost and no identity is the same, yet all are interrelated. So you can theoretically expand your consciousness to include the knowledge of your past lives, though those lives were yours and not yours. They have a common root, as next year’s leaves have a common root with the leaves now of this plant (pointing again to the begonia).

Such knowledge, however, would automatically affect those past lives. Ideas of cause and effect can hold you back here, because it seems to you that the leaves of next year come as an effect caused by this year’s leaves.¹⁰ To the plant and its innate creative pattern, however, all of its manifestations are one — an expression of itself, each portion different. The knowledge of its “future” leaves, as potential pattern, exists now. The same applies to the psyche. In that greater realm of reality there is creative interplay, and interrelationships between all aspects of selfhood.

“As you have probably supposed by now, there is consciousness in everything. Visible or invisible to you, each fragment of the universe has a consciousness of its own. Pain and pleasure, the strongest aspects of all consciousnesses, are experienced by every fragment, according to its degree. Differentiation is of course various, and it is in the degree of differentiation that consciousnesses are different.”