“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.

Give us a moment … The information carried by the chromosomes is not general, but highly specific. It is codified data (itself alive) that contains within it the essence of ancestral knowledge — change that to ancestral experience — of specific ancestral experience. Biologically you do indeed carry within you, then, the memories of your particular ancestors. These form a partial basis for your subjective and physical existence, and provide the needed support for it.

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.

Reincarnational experience is also transmitted, then, and can be retranslated from a biological code-imprint into emotional awareness. Again, however, as you are not your parents or your ancestors, you are not your “reincarnational selves.”

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.

You cannot say that your ancestors, like some strange plants, were growing toward what you are, or that you are the sum of their experiences. They were, they are, themselves. You cannot say that you are the sum of your past reincarnational lives either, and for the same reasons. You cut off the knowledge of yourself, and so divisions seem to occur. You are somewhat like a plant that recognizes only one of its leaves at a time. A leaf feels its deeper reality as a part of the plant, and adds to its own sense of continuity, and even to its own sense of individuality. But you often pretend that you are some odd dangling leaf, with no roots, growing without a plant to support you.