“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. The whole idea of probable realities seems strange or esoteric only because you are not used to following your own thought processes.

Then you feel as if you are the pawns of fate, and the idea of probable actions seems like the sheerest nonsense. Each event seems inevitable. If this attitude is carried to excessive lengths, then it even appears that you have no hand at all in the making of your own reality. You will always feel yourself a victim.

New paragraph (as Seth often declares). When you identify with only one particular level of your thought processes, however, the others — when you sense them — appear alien. You begin to feel threatened, determined to uphold your old ideas of selfhood. Plants grow many leaves. One leaf does not threaten the existence of others, and the plant is not jealous of its own foliage. So there is no need to protect your own individuality because it may send out other shoots into probable realities. This is simply the self growing in different directions, spreading its seeds.

(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.

(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.”

“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.

“When you think that perhaps your species came from another planetary system, in time terms, then of course you are still dealing with old concepts. In your usual terms of thinking, the earth does not exist at all (emphatically) — not if you are considering it as a chunk of matter occupying a certain position in a physical cosmos. It is really futile to question whether the universe came from a big boom (again emphatically, humorously), or is constantly expanding (though in those terms I have said it continually expands, as an idea or a dream does). I am not saying the universe does not exist — only that it does not exist in the way that it seems to you.