“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Imagine a string of different-colored Christmas tree lights, all glowing on a given tree. In this series of lights, any one light can go out while the others continue to shine. You are familiar with that arrangement.

However, in our imaginary assortment there are many such strings, and when a light goes out on one string “it” almost automatically appears on another string. Now generally speaking the lights are all lit at once on any given string, except for those that now and then go out.

Pretend that you are very tiny, and moving slowly about the tree so that you see only one light at a time. It appears that one light exists before the other, then, and each one is so brilliant to your focus that it blots out the lights before and after it. You may have a dim memory of the light you “saw” before, however, and so you think: “Aha, the bulb I see is my life, but I’m sure that long ago I had a different life — and perhaps another one lies ahead of me.” But unless you step far back from the tree you will not realize that the entire string of lights exists at once. Nor will you understand that when one light goes out in a strand it appears somewhere else on the tree in another strand.

If you were still tinier, then any given bulb itself might seem to emit not a steady light at all, but a series of waves, and you might identify your life with any given wave, so that great distance might be perceived between one wave and the next.¹²

A tree could be wired with lights, with each one having its own particular series [of waves]. The people who put up the tree might experience one Christmas Eve, while other consciousnesses, tuned in to the different series, could experience endless generations¹³ — and their perceptions would be quite as legitimate as those of the light-watchers who had erected the tree.