“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … Those intimate realizations, however, had to be counterbalanced in line with certain purposes set by your species, and even for that matter momentarily set aside so that other abilities and characteristics could emerge. The species’ sense of curiosity would not allow it to stay in any home territory for long,⁶ and so the sense of intimacy was purposely broken. It would become highly important again, however, when the planet was populated extensively, as it is now — only the original feeling of home area has to be extended over the face of the earth. The “absent” portions of the self are ready to emerge. The other, to you probable, lines of consciousness can now come into play.

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.

There is a constant interaction in the plant, between its parts, that you do not perceive. The leaves now present are biologically valid, interrelating in your terms. Yet in time terms each leaf is also aware of the past history of the plant, and biologically they spring up from that “past.”

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.

2. After the session Jane told me she’d had the thought during an idle moment early last week, but had forgotten to mention it. She wasn’t able to elaborate upon her original idea now.

“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.”

9. When Seth mentions reincarnation now, I usually think of a certain delivery of his in Volume 1. After 10:45 in the 683rd session, see the paragraph of material beginning with this phrase: “Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context….” Also see Note 3 for that session.