“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.

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.

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.

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.