“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:59.) Give us a moment … (Jane, in trance, lit a cigarette. ) Your ideas of Atlantis are partially composed of future memories. They are psychic yearnings toward the ideal civilization — patterns within the psyche, even as each fetus has within it the picture of its own most ideal fulfillment toward which it grows.

Atlantis is a land that you want to inhabit, appearing in your literature, your dreams, and your fantasies,⁸ serving as an impetus for development. It is real and valid. In your terms it is not “yet” physical fact, but in some ways it is more real than any physical fact, for it is a psychic blueprint.⁹

It carries also, however, the imprint of your fears, for the tales say that Atlantis was destroyed. You place it in your past while it exists in your future. Not the destruction alone, but the entire pattern seen through the framework of your beliefs. Beside this, however, many civilizations have come and gone in somewhat the same manner, and the “myth” [of Atlantis] is based somewhat then on physical fact in your terms.¹⁰

The species then moves into its own new houses. Atlantis is the story of a future probability projected backward into an apparent past.

(I read to Jane the few paragraphs of material Seth had given on Atlantis. Both of us thought it quite sensible, although it brought up questions I’ll get to shortly. I’ll have to admit that we cringe a bit when Seth talks about cultish concepts like Atlantis. We always think that such beliefs, while serving a variety of quite legitimate creative and psychic purposes, are very likely to be more mythic than physically factual. The word “physically” is important here. From these remarks it’s easy to see that we feel much more comfortable with the ideas about Atlantis that Seth advanced in this session. “He’s got more on it, too,” Jane said now, but she didn’t go back into trance.

(The questions I referred to concern the fact that once in The Seth Material and nine times in Seth Speaks, by my count, Seth spoke of Atlantis as being in our historical past. He did so this evening also, of course, when he remarked at 10:59 that our “ideas of Atlantis are partially composed of future memories” — thus leaving room for past manifestations. Seth’s theory of simultaneous time, which can encompass the notion of future probabilities projected backward into an apparent past, for instance, leaves great leeway for the interpretation of events or questions, however, and makes the idea of contradiction posed by an Atlantis in the past and one in the future too simple as an explanation. At any given “time,” depending on whatever information he’s given previously, Jane could just as easily quote Seth as placing Atlantis in our historic past, or in a probable past, present, or future — or all four “places” at once, for that matter. Any or all of these views would simply be repatterning other dimensions of time from our “present point of power.”

(Questions of reincarnation enter in also. Seth has connected himself with Atlantis only once, but he did so very definitely; from the 588th session for Chapter 22 of Seth Speaks: “I was … born in Atlantis.” Jane and I felt those same uneasy twinges then, too, but chose not to explore them at that time.

(After this evening’s session, however, we decided we’d like to know why in Seth’s view Atlantis had moved from its long, if uneasy residence in our “historical past” forward into a future probable reality. We resolved to ask him to explain — but strangely enough, I note later, a month passed before we got around to a session on the subject. By then, Seth had been through with “Unknown” Reality for three weeks. Now I refer the reader to Note 11 for quotations from the session, the 747th, in question.)

10. In Volume 1, quotations from Seth’s material just given on Atlantis are presented in Note 3 for Session 702.

11. I found it quite difficult to extract from the 747th session the material I wanted for this note on Atlantis, so interwound is it with closely related information on early man and animal kingdoms, the expanding-universe theory, archaeology, Jane’s other work, All That Is, and so forth. (Some of those topics have been discussed in earlier sessions or notes, but no such references are given here, nor is any new backup material offered.)

Jane and I regard Seth’s latest delivery on Atlantis as still being only a partial explanation of the whole question of myth and fantasy versus “physical fact,” no matter what time schemes may be involved. We intend to explore it all as much as we can in “future” work.

“Atlantis. First of all, take it for granted — as you do — that your ideas about the age of the earth are erroneous. There were intelligent human beings far earlier than is supposed; and because you assume a one-line kind of progression from an apelike creature to man, you ignore any evidence that shows to the contrary. There were highly developed human beings with elaborate civilizations, existing simultaneously with what you might call animal kingdoms — that is, more or less organized primeval animal tribes, possessing their own kinds of ‘primitive’ cultures.

“Those species did not vie for domination of the earth, but simply shared the same general environment with the more sophisticated groupings beyond their own perimeters. There were many highly technical human cultures, but in your terms not on a global scale. The legend of Atlantis is actually based upon several such civilizations. No particular civilization is the basis, however. Apart from that, the legend as picked up, so to speak, by Plato (see Appendix 14) was a precognition of the future probability, an image of an inner civilization of the mind actually projected outward into the future, where it would be used as a blueprint, dash — the lost grandeur, as, in other terms, Eden became the lost garden of paradise.

“Ruburt has implied in [his novel] The Education of Oversoul Seven that some archaeological discoveries about the past (underlined) are not discovered in your present because they do not exist yet. Now such concepts are difficult to explain in my kind of prose, and in your language. But in certain terms, the ruins of Atlantis have not been found because they have not been placed in your past yet, from the future.

“Atlantis and the Garden of Eden are the same in that regard.

“In that kind of framework, how can I explain an Atlantis? It exists both in your past and future, a probable world that some of you will choose from a model placed in the past of your future — partially based upon fact, in your terms, but with its greatest validity lying in its possibilities.”