“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.

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

As simply as I can explain it, your planet is also “divided” into time and probability areas. Period. So many civilizations exist at once, then, and there are certain bleed-throughs. In your terms some civilizations are real and perceivable, and some are not.

“Now I am going to say good evening shortly, but remember — you call this your universe and your reality, and it is indeed, for you form it. Within you also is the knowledge of other great experiments that are being tried, just as other probable systems are aware of the experiments you are involved with. I am speaking in your terms only, which means that to some extent I am hedging — but other civilizations have gone your route. Some have failed, but the inhabitants of some earths have succeeded very well.

“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.

“Now the future is probable. However, in your terms there are ruins of the civilizations that served as the ‘concrete’ basis for the one Atlantean legend. Those civilizations were scattered. The so-called ruins would not be found in any one place as expected, therefore. There are some beneath the Aegean Sea, and some beneath an offshoot of the Atlantic, and some beneath the Arctic, for the world had a different shape.

“In far greater terms (louder, humorously), at the risk of repeating myself, time is simultaneous, so those civilizations exist along with your own. Your methods of dating the age of the earth are very misleading.