“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I were also interested in the fact that we’d seldom been on Foster Avenue, even though it lay within comfortable walking distance of the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; nor could either of us recall having noticed the “Foster Avenue place” before. We speculated that we’d “homed in on it” now, as if for the first time, because our combined focus was opening up in the direction of homes.

Some people structure their lives around their children, others around a career, or pleasure, or even pain. Again, these are simply certain focuses that you choose, that direct your experience. You can add other focuses while still retaining your own identity — indeed, enriching it.

So you look back through the historical past. All of the counterparts alive as contemporaries then form, together, a musical composition in what you think of as a present; and once that multidimensional song is struck then its past ripples out behind it, so to speak, and its future sings “ahead.” But the song is being created from its beginning and its end simultaneously. In this case, however, it is as if each note has its own consciousness and is free to change its portion of the melody. Yet all are in the same overall composition, in “time,” so that time itself serves as the scale (gesturing) in which the [musical] number is written — chosen as a matter of organization, focus, and framework.

Tasting those qualities to the utmost, from that framework the psyche probes the fires of vitality and being as experienced from that specific viewpoint, and the despondency can be more alive than an unprobed, barely experienced joy. In the same manner, certain individuals can and do choose life experiences that involve great tragedies. Yet those tragic lives are used as a focus point that actually brings into experience, through comparison, the great vitality and thrust of being.

To some extent you can actualize portions of your own unknown reality, and draw them into the experienced area of your life. There is an obvious relationship between one note and another in a musical composition. Now in terms of physical families and in larger terms of countries, there is a relationship between realities, which constantly change as the notes do. To some extent your reality is picked up by your contemporaries. They accept it or not according to the particular theme or focus of their lives.

(The phone stopped ringing — at last.) As contemporaries, counterparts choose a particular time framework. The time format alone makes certain focuses clear, that in your terms could not be made in another context. What you learn in your present about industry — “progress” — and the equitable sharing of the earth’s products, could only be learned in a context in which industrialism was experienced as going too far, where technology was seen and known as a growing jeopardy.