“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The fact is that each individual lives many lives, and that the inner self is quite aware of its own spiritual and physical dexterity. The body consciousness alone understands that its physical existence in any one life is dependent upon its physical death — and that that death will assure it of still another existence. The “drive for survival” is, therefore, a drive that leads to death and beyond it, for all of consciousness understands that it survives through many forms and conditions.

Reincarnational influences are not nearly as rigid as many believers in the concept think. That is, reincarnational influences usually leave many options open to an individual in any case. It is quite simplistic, for example, to say, as some people do, that any given particular event from a past life leads inevitably to a particularly matching effect in a present one. There are too many other elements that also apply to the human personality. No one is “fated” to have bad health. No one is punished in one life for “evil” activities in a previous one.

A person who has been cruel in one life may choose to experience conditions in the next life in which he or she understands the meaning of cruelty, but this does not mean that such a person would then necessarily experience an entire lifetime as a victim.

New learning would always be involved, and thus new options would always be open. There are, in fact, so many distorted ideas connected with the concept of reincarnation in general, that I think it far better to simply concentrate upon the idea of multiple existences. Period. Because of the true nature of time, and the interrelationships of consciousness, a future life affects a past one, for in actuality all of these existences happen simultaneously. All systems are open-ended, particularly psychological ones. In greater terms, you are working “at all levels” and at all of your own existences at once, even though it is useful sometimes to think of reincarnation as a series of lives, one after the other.