“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

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

(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.”

(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.)

“As you think of it, your future is not set. You can follow any road you choose, but — until you realize that as individuals you each form your own personal life, and have a part in the mass creation of reality — there is much learning ahead for you. This is a lesson you are meant to fully understand within physical reality.

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.

“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.

“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 your terms, from your present you ‘plant’ images, tales, legends, ‘at any given time,’ that seem to come from the past, but are actually like ghost images from the future, for you to follow or disregard as you choose.

“All That Is creates its reality as it goes along. Each world has its own impetus, yet all are ultimately connected. The true dimensions of a divine creativity would be unendurable for any one consciousness of whatever import, and so that splendor is infinitely dimensionalized (most intensely throughout), worlds spiraling outward with each ‘moment’ of a cosmic breath; with the separation of worlds a necessity, and with individual and mass comprehension always growing at such a rate that All That Is multiplies itself at microseconds, building both pasts and futures and other time scales you do not recognize. Each is a reality in itself, with its own potentials, and with no individual consciousness, however minute, ever lost.

“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.”