“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many proponents of reincarnation believe most firmly that an illness in one life most frequently has its roots in a past existence, and that reincarnational regression is therefore necessary to uncover the reasons for many current illnesses or dilemmas.

[...] Therefore, you may be punished in this life for errors you have committed in a past one, or you may actually be making up for a mistake made thousands of years ago. [...]

I must remind you once more that all time happens simultaneously, so the confused belief about punishment now, in retaliation for past action would actually be meaningless, since in simultaneous time all actions would be occurring at once.

If you do have health problems, it is much better to look for their reasons in your immediate experience, rather than assigning them a cause in the distant past. [...]

[...] Yet in time terms each leaf is also aware of the past history of the plant, and biologically they spring up from that “past.”

[...] A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

To that extent the so-called past experience of your ancestors and of your species is concurrent with your own, biologically speaking. [...]

[...] The same applies to reincarnational existences that you think of as occurring in the past.

[...] These struggle desperately to distort the past data, clothing it in all sorts of idea camouflages and fantasy. In this case insanity is actually a protective mechanism, in that the personality will face almost complete disorientation rather than confront truths in its past that bring up problems it cannot solve. [...]

After this point was passed, and all inner warnings went unheeded, then to one or another, little by little, or perhaps in flashes, clear pictures from the past would rush to the personality who was no longer strong enough to hold them back. [...] The past’s inner data would be turned into delusions, fantasies and so forth.

They were drawn to each other because of those previous ties, and yet in that past life this daughter was extremely cruel, particularly in speech, to Throckmorton. [...]

[...] In your technological age such problems are easier to solve than in the past. [...]

[...] Here the past still happens. [...] Past motion and acts still go on, not recurring — it’s hard to explain — but those past actions are still exploring other probabilities, while our nervous structure focuses us in the one (physical) probable reality we’ve chosen. [...]

“These ‘past’ probabilities are not fleshed out in our terms, but they’re brilliantly focused in their own life. In the Saratoga experience¹ I felt ghostly because there I was a future probability … At certain levels of consciousness, through bypassing direct neurological activity and impact, you can then glimpse other portions of your own probable experience — both in the future and the past.

[...] Fresh material was being born anew in the past, and he didn’t know how to fit it into his time scheme.”

[...] When you look at world events, however, the present world situation for example (the war between Iraq and Iran, which began a few days ago), try to enlarge the scope of your intellectual reach, so that you consider world events as living multidimensional “novels” being formed in the present in response to both future and past triggers. The impact of the future on the past, in your terms — or rather, the implications of the future on the present — are highly important, and such precognitive reactions are as vital, numerous, and real as you ordinarily think that the reactions to past events are (intently).

[...] In a fashion the triplets were reacting in their past to a future event that has now caught up with them, so that each of their actions in any moment of that past happened as a result of a tension — a creative tension — between the event of their original separation and the event of their future reunion.

The idea, then, of the novel came from past and future events, though you were to catch up with those future events very quickly. [...]

[...] Men act, then, in relationship to events that have, historically speaking, not yet occurred — but those events happening, say, in the future, in certain terms cast their shadows back into the present, or illuminate the past according to the events’ characteristics. [...]

What you have been in danger of doing is using too much energy oriented toward the past, and this will also show itself in your physical reactions. Your trouble of yesterday and today does indeed originate because you have not been painting, but one of the reasons that you have not been painting is that energy has been used as a searchlight into the past, searching for certain origins.

[...] At your present stage of development with the pendulum you get a reaction that could be compared to a closed circuit, where the energy is directed into the past, into the personal subconscious too abruptly, and too intensified, and is not yet allowed the release of discovering full causes, which would then release not only that energy, but the energy that has in the past gone into the formation of various physical ills.

These incidents in the past, that appear as the original initiation of an illness, they represent points, or kinks, where energy is not smoothly used, but tends to bunch up because of a resistance. [...]

[...] It becomes to all intents and purposes a dead end, isolated from the acceptance of the whole ego, and the most advantageous solution here is, of course, that the ego in one manner or another is made to accept this particular portion of its own past.

[...] You are angry at what you have done to yourself because in a past life you had much to do with the organization that you do not now like. [...] I am not telling you to feel guilty for the past. [...] What you feel is legitimate but it is also charged heavily because of your own past existence—so, if I am warning you, I am simply warning you gently. [...]

[...] But those who have been princes in the Church in the past often find themselves confronted in later lives with the laws and regulations that they themselves helped form. [...]

[...] These words, as you listen to them later, should bring other intuitions to you and insights concerning past life experience. [...]

[...] The two of you are together now in order to help solve some of the problems that you encountered together in this particular past life. [...]

There, I lived in the land people called Atlantis in your past. The Atlantis, however, as it is known in myth and pseudo-fact, is a psychic structure from the future that sheds its light backward into the past, and illuminates not one but several past cultures, which taken together, become in your terms a conglomerate Atlantis.

[...] When you speak of reincarnation, the past is usually considered, as you have yourself often noted. [...] If all of your lives are looked at like a Ferris wheel, then this is the seat you are in when you get off, though some of the other boxes or seats may be labeled future or past.

[...] The past changes, even as in your terms, say, a river does—only the changes go out in all directions. [...]

[...] Framework 1 looks to time, and particularly the past, as authority.

So, when I “meet” another, I may be able to relate to him much better on the basis of a particular past life experience, even though in my “now” we have little in common. We may have known each other, for example, as entirely different people in the fourteenth century, and we may communicate very nicely by discussing those experiences, much as you and your hypothetical childhood friend established rapport by remembering your past.

[...] We are aware of what you would call our past selves, those personalities we have adopted in various other existences.

[...] As you will see, this analogy is a rather simple one that will do only for now, because past, present, and future do not really exist in those terms.

[...] We have far more friends and associates than you do, simply because we are aware of varying connections in what we call for now “past” incarnations.

As a matter of fact there has been such a population problem in the past, in your terms, on several occasions and involving your planet. [...]

Three men, three we have mentioned in the past. [...]

[...] Philip has either been offered another job in the immediate past or will be in the very immediate future. [...]

If you have not been asked in the very immediate past, in this month, then you will be asked in the month of June.

[...] And since past, present and future exist now in your terms you need bridges, because you do not really understand the nature of time, so you think you need a bridge to get from past to present or from past to future or from one kind of reality to another. [...] They are memories that come to you from yourselves from both the future and the past. [...]

[...] And what is there about a language that has both beginnings and endings in it as you think of them, elements of a distant past and portents of what perhaps languages might be in your future? [...]

If, and I am speaking now metaphorically, if-if-if-if-if there was ever a Sumari language existing in the past then it had to be created, and if you want it to be found you had better help create it. [...]

He was not a priest in a past life, he was a sailor. [...]

[...] An action of the present in your terms cannot be based or caused by an action in the past, and neither action can be the cause of a future action in a basic reality where neither past nor future exist.

[...] In actuality there is only a spacious present, so spacious that it cannot be explored all at once in your terms, hence your arbitrary division of it into larger rooms of past, present and future.

[...] This gives you also the illusion of past and future, and to you it appears that the present is a fleeting, almost ashen illusion in itself, beyond any true remembrance and beyond the reach of any but nostalgic recall. [...]

[...] But as the walls of your house are experienced by your outer senses, and serve to protect you against other camouflage materializations, even those of wind and rain and cold, so do the walls of past, present and future, erected by you as a different kind of camouflage pattern, protect you from inner forces and realities with which you are not as yet equipped to deal.

For some time you have all been searching, and I hope to show you how to ask the proper questions; for in the questions you will find the answers, and in the answers you shall be yourselves; and knowing yourselves fulfill your purpose and expand the limitations of your own consciousness until you can search out the past and the present and see yourselves as you are, and know that you are more than you think you are, and fulfill those abilities which you have partially developed in past lives. [...]

[...] You are ready to learn about your past lives and to prepare for your future ones. [...]

(Now Jane, as Seth, pointed to Bonnie.) One I have known vaguely in my own past. [...]

[...] The personality in the past used psychic abilities for the wrong purposes. [...]

(9:46.) Some of the material (in this session) on pain should help clear Ruburt’s mind, but the past week’s blue periods and so forth simply represented one more example of a situation in which he tried to make himself get better by “realizing the gravity of his condition”—by contrasting his performance against “normal” performance, and by the old beliefs of not trusting the body. [...]

[...] He should forget any past behaviors, and start from the present, so that improvements are recognized and not lost in dissatisfaction.

[...] Some individuals will retain strong memories of their past lives, and others will not. [...]

It does you no good as an infant to recall your success of a life past in your terms, for then you feel twice as helpless. [...]

[...] This one (Sue) has abilities from past lives to deal with and to use—and a greater responsibility to use them. [...]

[...] But I also see, in your terms, your future and your past and the probabilities of your development, and the abilities that you have and must use. [...]

[...] You do not simply change, or enlarge, your ideas or beliefs about the past — but you change the events of the past themselves for yourself, and sometimes for others also.

In the past, the body itself was depressed (a very important point), running at low gear, and this is certainly not the case now. [...]

(“Do you want to say something about our discussion yesterday, about changing the past from the present?” I felt that Seth was bound to agree with Jane’s version of what he’d said, rather than mine.

[...] The situation was somewhat frustrating, since I’d looked forward to some good material in changing the past from the present; I hadn’t wanted the question to be forgotten.

Your morning discussion, concerning Ruburt’s past, was also beneficial, for it is good to remind yourselves of your own (underlined) backgrounds, rather than ever comparing yourselves with other people whose own backgrounds may have little to do with yours. [...]

(Long pause.) Love-making reunites you with your own pasts, and unconscious bodily memory carries you backward to your earliest responses to your own body and that of others. [...]

[...] That is (pause), it arouses memories from your own most intimate moments in the past, and therefore in its own way records the development of ideas and attitudes that you might otherwise completely overlook. [...]

When you ask why you did not understand when you were young what you know now, you are ignoring the validity of your own past to some extent, and denying the accomplishments that have resulted—because it seems that you should now be much further on, so that you create a kind of artificial self who began where you are now, and with whom it seems you can never catch up. [...]

You need not experience those past dream events, although if you just turn your attention in that direction then the dream’s past will become apparent. [...] The past and future ripple outward from any event, making it “thicker” than it appears to be.

[...] Even in the dream state, any present expands into its own version of past and future; so in those terms the dream possesses its own background, its own kind (underlined) of historic past, the moment you construct it.

In greater terms, the past is definitely created from the present. [...]

Psychologically, then, while you are living your memories follow a pattern of past into present. [...]

However, it seems to you that all action in the past is fixed and done, while behavior in the future alone is open to change — so the word “prediction” assumes future action. Basically, the past is as open to change as the future is. [...]

When you seemingly look backward into time, and construct a history, you do so by projecting your own prime series of events into the past as it is understood. Obviously you read the past from the present, but you also create it from the present as well. [...]

[...] Now when Jane and I drive past the old house we lived in on Water Street, close by downtown Elmira, we engender within ourselves mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity. [...]

Past associations merge with present reality and form a pattern. [...]

In our past sessions I have explained time distortions, and you are familiar with the spacious present. So it should be no surprise to realize that basically the future is in existence now, and the past has never been swept away. [...]

The actuality of what I call the past has not gone out of existence, and the future exists in actuality in the past. [...]

The gradations of intensities are so minute that it would be impossible to measure them, and yet each field contains in coded form the actual living reality of endless eons; contains therefore what you would call the past, present and future of unnumbered universes; contains the actual coded data of any and every consciousness that has been or will be, in any universe; those that have appeared to vanish, and those which seemingly do not yet exist.

[...] When the inner self in its constant motion travels through an impulse range which it has once experienced, to the ego this will appear as a journey into the past.