The Tyranny of Time

From Session 727 in Seth's The "Unknown" Reality, Volume Two

… In your terms, the land changes through the ages.  Mountains and islands arise, then disappear, to reemerge in new form.  The oceans rise and fall also, and in some cases the floor of the ocean becomes the surface of the planet, only to be covered again by water.  Yet through all of the changes the earth retains a landscape, and at any given time the features of the land are quite dependable and permanent enough for your purposes.

… In somewhat the same way the psyche sends up counterparts of itself, each with different features or characteristics.  As the physical properties of the earth distribute themselves in a certain given fashion about the surface of the planet, so do the properties of the earth-tuned psyches distribute themselves.

As all physical matter is connected in any particular time, or era, so the individual consciousness of each being is also connected with every other.  This applies to all consciousness as you understand the term.

A mountain is composed of many layers of rock that serve, as you think of it, as its foundation.  The top of the mountain represents the present to you, and the tiers of rock beneath stand for the past.  The mountain itself is not any one of those rock layers that seemingly compose it, however.  There is a relationship between the mountain and those strata but the term “mountain” is one that you have applied.  In greater terms the mountain and all of its components exist at once, of course.  You can examine the various levels of rock structures.  Geologists can tell when, in terms of time, certain sedimentary deposits formed.  The rocks themselves still exist in the geologist’s present time, or they could not make such an examination.  The mountain would not be a mountain without that “foundation”.  Again, however, it is not any one of those rock layers.

In somewhat the same manner, the self that you know is the mountain, and the rock layers forming it are past lives.

You are not any of those past selves, even though they are a part of the history of your being.  They are themselves in their own space and time.  They exist simultaneously with your own life, even as the strata of rock exist simultaneously with the mountain.

Your present existence, however, is highly related to those other levels of selfhood.  Now what happens at the top of the mountain affects all that goes on below, and so everything that you do affects those other realms of selfhood, and there is an interchange that occurs constantly.  Physical conditions may be quite different in the valley, in the foothills of the mountain, and at its top.  The very climate and vegetation may vary considerably, and yet all life and vegetation within the area are interrelated.  Each layer of life that composes the mountain is equally valid and important, and each concentrates upon its own reality at its own level.

Like the mountain, therefore, you have a history in terms of the present that is yours, and yet not yours.  It does not control you, for you alter it with each thought and action, even as each motion at the mountain’s top affects its base.  The layers at the bottom, however, are also constantly changing, so that the whole area is a gestalt of relatedness.

In the physical world, islands, valleys, plateaus, continents and oceans all have their place, and serve to form the physical basis of your reality.  Each blade of grass helps form the life of the earth.  So each consciousness, however minute, is indispensable in its place and time.

Each flower on a hillside looks out with its own unique vision of the world, and each consciousness does the same thing, fulfilling a position impossible for any other consciousness to fulfill.

In terms of time only, there is an archaeological meaning that is hidden within your own nature.  To discover it you look “down” through the levels of your own being, there to find the layers of selfhood that in your world represent the past history of yourself, from which you emerged.  You are not those selves psychically, however, any more than you are your mother’s or your father’s in physical terms.  You are as different from those reincarnational selves, therefore, as you are from your parents, though you share certain backgrounds and characteristics.

It is easy for you to see how you affect your parents in your lifetime, though they are older than you.  In the same way, however, you affect your reincarnational family.

When it rains, water rushes in great exuberant gushes down the sides of the mountain, bringing life and vitality to all of its parts.  In somewhat the same way, your own experiences flow down and into the cracks and crevices of all the other times and centuries that compose your present lifetime.

I have a surprise for you, however, for I have been speaking of you as the top of your mountain – for it certainly seems to you that you are at the top, so to speak.  Instead, your vantage point and your focus is such that you cannot turn your head to look higher.  Perhaps you are like a fine sunny cliff on the side of the mountain, jutting out, looking down to the valley beneath, not realizing that the mountain itself continues [up] beyond you.  You are, then, in the position of any of the other levels “beneath”, many also thinking themselves the top of the mountain, looking only downward.

You are convinced that you cannot see the future, and this means – in terms of our analogy, at least – that you cannot look upward beyond your own time.  While that is the case, you will always think of reincarnation as occurring in the past.

Think instead of strata of being, each simultaneously occurring.  Physically the human fetus bears a memory of its “past”.  In your terms, it travels through the stages of evolution before attaining its human form.  It attains that form, however, because it responds to a future time, a future self not as yet physically created.

The fetus itself, before its conception, responds to a self not yet physically apparent; and the future, in those terms, draws new life from the past.  A reality of selfhood, an idea not yet materialized in the unformed future, reaches down into the past and brings that future into realization.  The cells are imprinted with physical information in terms of space and time, but those data come from a reality in which space and time are formed.

The knowledge of probabilities brings forth present time and reality.  Voices speak through the genes and chromosomes that connect the future and the past in a balance that you call the present form.  The history of the private psyche and the mass experience of the species, again, resides in each individual.  The archaeology of the past and the future alike is alive within the layers of consciousness that compose your being.

In many ways your language itself has a history that you do not understand.

The past is obviously built into words in terms of time.  When you speak a given word you may not know the history of its changes through the years, yet you speak it perfectly.  You seldom realize that the present state of your language, whatever it is, will for others someday seem to be an archaic version.  In whatever terms, again, you think of yourselves as being at the top of the mountain.  In your terms, language presupposes a particular kind of development of mind, and when you think of language you tie the two together.

There are languages that have nothing to do with words – or with thoughts as you understand them.  Yet some of these communicate in a far more precise fashion.

Cellular transmission, for example, is indeed much more precise than any verbal language, communicating data so intricate that all of your languages together would fall far short of matching such complexity.  This kind of communication carries information that a thousand alphabets could not translate.  In such a way, one part of the body knows what is happening in every other part, and the body as a whole knows its precise position on the surface of the planet.  It is biologically aware of all the other life-forms around it to the most minute denominator.

This applies to the future as well as to the past.  The body itself knows the source of water, for example, and food.  Natives divorced from your technology do very well, as wild animals also do, in probing the life of the planet and their positions within it.

A simple tree deals with the nature of probabilities as it thrusts forward into new seeds.  Computations go on constantly within it, and that communication involves an inner kind of language innocent of symbols and vowels.  The tree knows its present and future history, in your terms, but it understands a future that is not preordained.  It feels its own power in the present as it constructs that future.  In deeper terms, the tree’s seeds also realize that there is a future there – a variety of futures toward which they grope.

The fetus also understands that it can respond to a stimulus – to any stimulus it chooses – from a variety of probable futures.  So do you unconsciously grope toward probable futures that to one extent or another beckon you onward.

You choose your futures, but you also choose your pasts.  There is only so much that I can say, since I am using a verbal language that in itself makes a tyrant of time.  This book is paced in such a way, however, that if you follow it an inner language will be initiated.  This in itself annihilates your stereotyped concepts and releases you from time’s dictatorship.  Some of the exercises to be given in this section will be geared to that purpose.

An archaeologist or a geologist examining “old” rock strata will find dead fossils, just as from your viewpoint you will discover “dead” past lives as you look “downward” through your psyche.  You will seem to view finished reincarnational existences, even as from his present the geologist will discover only inanimate fossils embedded in rock.  Those fossils are still alive, however.  The geologist is simply not tuned in to their life area.  So reincarnational lives are still occurring, but they are a part of your being.  They are not you, and you are not your reincarnational past.

To a future self no more illuminated than you are, you appear dead and lifeless – a dim memory.  When you look into the universe from your viewpoint, it seems as if you look into the past.  Scientists tell you that when the light from every distant galaxy reaches you, the galaxy is already dead.  In the same way, when you look “backward” into the psyche the life you may indistinctly view – the past life – is already vanished.  Why is it that your scientist’s instruments do not allow them to look into the future instead, into worlds not yet born, since they operate so well in discerning the past?  And why is it, with all of your ideas about reincarnation, there is precious little said about future lives?

The answer is that your language is limited.  Your verbal language – for your biological communication is quite aware of probable future events, and the body constantly maintains itself amid a maze of probabilities.

Identity

From Session 725 in Seth's "Unknown Reality" Volume 2

… in your terms “pure” identity has no form.  You speak of one self within one body because you are only familiar with one portion of yourself.  You suppose that all personhood in one way or another must have an equivalent of a human form, spiritual or otherwise, to “inhabit”.

Identity itself is composed of pure energy.  It takes up no space.  It takes up no time.  I said that there are invisible particles that can appear in more than one place simultaneously.  So can identity.  Atoms and molecules build blocks of matter, in your terms, even while the atoms and molecules remain separate.  The table between Joseph and myself does not feel invaded by the invisible particles that compose it.  For that matter, if you will forgive me for that old pun, the atoms and molecules that form the table today did not have anything to do with the table five years ago – though the table appeared the same then as now.

In the same way, quite separate identities can merge with others in a give-and-take gestalt, in which the overall intent is as clear as the shape of the table. …

In your terms the earth at any given time represents the most exquisite physical, spiritual, and psychic cooperation, in which all consciousness are related and contribute to the overall reality.  Physically, this is somewhat understood.

It is difficult to explain on spiritual and psychic levels without speaking in terms of gradations of identity, for example, but in your terms even the smallest “particle” of identity is inviolate.  It may grow, develop or expand, change alliances or organizations, and it does combine with others even as cells do.  Your body does not feel as if you invade it.  Your consciousness and its consciousness are merged; yet it is composed of the multitudinous individual consciousnesses that form the tiniest physical particles within it.  Those particles come and go, yet your body remains itself.  What was physically a part of you last year is not today.  Physically, you are a different person.  Put simply, the stuff of the body is constantly returned to the earth, where it forms again into physical actualization – but always differently.

In somewhat the same way your identity changes constantly, even while you retain your sense of permanence.  That sense of permanence rides upon endless changes – it is actually dependent upon those physical, spiritual, and psychic changes.  In your terms, for example, if they did not occur constantly your body would die.  The cells, again, are not simply minute, handy, unseen particles that happen to compose your organs.  They also possess consciousnesses of their own.  That [kind of] consciousness unites all physical matter.

There is indeed a communication existing that joins all of nature, an inner webwork, so that each part of the earth knows what its other parts are doing.  Cells are organizations, ever-changing, forming and unforming.

Cells compose natural forms.  An identity is not a thing of a certain size or shape that must always appear in one given way.  It is a unit of consciousness ever itself and inviolate while still free to form other organizations, enter other combinations in which all other units also decide to play a part.  As there are different shapes to physical objects, then, so identity can take different shapes – and basically those forms are far more rich and diverse than the variety of physical objects.

You speak about the chromosomes.  Your scientists write about heredity, buried and coded in the genes, blueprints for an identity not yet formed.  But there are psychic blueprints, so to speak, wherein each identity knows of its “history”; and taking any given line of development, projects that history.  The potential of such an identity is far greater, however, than can ever be expressed through any physical one-line kind of development.

Identities, then, do send out “strands of consciousness” into as many realities as possible, so that all versions of any given identity have the potential to develop in as many ways as possible.

You, as you think of yourself, may have trouble following such concepts, just as you would have trouble trying to follow the “future” reality of the cells within your body at this moment.  You must understand that in greater terms there is no big or small.  There is not a giant identity and a pygmy one.  Each identity is inviolate.  Each also unites with others while maintaining its individuality and developing its own potential.

A mountain exists.  It is composed of rocks and trees, grass and hills, and in your terms of time you can look at it, see it as such, give it a name, and ignore its equally independent parts.  Without those parts the mountain would not exist.  It is not invaded by the trees or rocks that compose it, and while trees grow and die the mountain itself, at least in your terms of time, exists despite the changes.  It is also dependent upon the changes.  In a manner of speaking your own identities as you think of them are dependent upon the same kinds of living organizations of consciousness.

Let us look at it differently.  People who read so-called “occult” literature may consider me “an old soul”, like a mountain.  In grand ancient fashion above other more homey village-like souls, I have my own identity.  Yet that identity is composed of other identities, each independent, as the mountain is composed of its rocks and could not exist without them, even while it rises up so grandly above the plain.  My understanding rests upon what I am, as the mountain’s height rests upon what it is.  I do not feel invaded by the selves or identities that compose me, nor do they feel invaded by me – any more than the trees, rocks, and grass would resent the mountain shape into which they have grown.

The top of the mountain can “see further”: Its view takes in the entire countryside.  So I can look into your reality, as the top of the mountain can look down to the plain and the village.  The mountain peak and the village are equally legitimate.

Let us look at this again in another way.

Your thinking mind, as you consider it, is the top of your mountain.  In certain terms you can see “more” than your cells can, though they are also conscious of their realities.  Were it not for their lives you would not be at the top of your psychological mountain.  Even the trees at the highest tip of the hillside send sturdy roots into the ground, and receive from it nourishment and vitality – and there is a great give-and-take between the smallest sapling in the foothills and the most ancient pine.  No single blade of grass dies but that it affects the entire mountain.  The energy within the grass sinks into the earth, and in your terms is again reborn.  Trees, rocks, and grass constantly exchange places as energy changes form.

Water rushes down the hillside into the valley, and there is a constant give-and-take between the village below, say, or the meadows, and the mountain.  So there is the same kind of transformation, change, and cooperation between all identities.  You can draw the lines where you will for convenience’s sake, but each identity retains its individuality and inviolate nature even while it constantly changes.

Trees bear seeds.  Some fall nearby.  Others are carried by the wind some distances into areas that the tree itself, for all of its height, could not perceive.

The tree does not feel less, itself, because it brings forth such seeds.  So identities throw off seeds of themselves in somewhat the same fashion.  These may grow up in quite different environments.  Their realities in no way threaten the identity of the “parent”.  Identities have free choice, so they will pick their environments or birthplaces.

Because a tree is physical, physical properties will be involved, and the seeds will mature following certain general principles or characteristics.  Atoms and molecules will sometimes form trees; sometimes they will become parts of couches.  They will form people or ants or blades of grass, yet in each of these ventures they will also retain their own sense of identity.  They combine to form cells and organs, and through all of these events they obtain different kinds of experience.

Physically speaking, and generally, your body is composed of grasses and ants and rocks and beasts and birds, for in one way or another all biological matter is related.  In certain terms, through your experience, birds and rocks speak alphabets – and certain portions of your own being fly or creep as birds or insects, forming the great gestalt of physical experience.  It is fashionable to say: “You are what you eat”; that, for example, “You must not eat meat because you are killing the animals, and this is wrong”.  But in deeper terms, physically and biologically, the animals are born from the body of the earth, which is composed of the corpses of men and women as much as it is of other matter.  The animals consume you, then, as often as you consume them, and they are as much a part of your humanity as you are a part of their so called animal nature.

The constant interchange that exists biologically means that the same physical stuff that composes a man or a woman may be dispersed, and later form a toad, a starfish, a dog or a flower.  It may be distributed into numberless different forms.  That arithmetic of consciousness is not annihilated.  It is multiplied and not divided.  Reminiscent within each form is the consciousness of all the other combinations, all of the other alliances, as identity continually forms new creative endeavors and gestalts of relatedness.  There is no discrimination, no prejudice.

When you eat, you must eliminate through your bowels.  That resulting matter eventually returns to the earth, where it helps form all other living things.  The “dead” matter – the residue of a bird, the sloughed-off cells – these things are not then used by other birds (though they may be occasionally), but by men and women.  There is no rule that says your discarded cellular material can be used only by your own species.  Yet in your terms any identity, no matter how “minute”, retains itself and its identity through many forms and alliances of organizations.

Through such strands of consciousness all of your world is related.  Your own identity sends out strands of itself constantly, then.  These mix psychically with other strands, as physically atoms and molecules are interchanged.  So there are different organizations of identity in which you play a part.

Ruburt is connected with me in that manner.  He is also connected with any ant in the backyard in the same way.  Yet I retain my identity, the ant retains its identity, and Ruburt retains his.  But one could not exist without the other two – for in greater terms the reality of any one of the three presupposes the existence of the others.

Seth Unknown Reality Vol 2, Session 724 extracts

 

… A person in time, then, can only do so much, and in your terms the great sources of the psyche are barely tapped in a given lifetime.

… individuals choose to develop certain portions of their abilities, and that such a choice often necessitates ignoring other talents.

In its own way, the world at any given time is a unit of individuals with deep psychic and biological connections.  Each of you take a hand at painting a combined world picture.  Though each version is slightly different, and some appear strange within the whole context, still a world picture emerges at any given “time”.

The people alive during any century are embarked upon certain overall challenges.  These are the result of private challenges that can best be worked out within a certain kind of framework.  Time as you understand it is utilized as a method of focus, a divider like a room divider, separating purposes instead of furniture.  If you want a “Victorian Room”, you do not plank it down in the middle of a Spanish arrangement.  Instead, you set it aside and frame it with its own décor, as you might in a museum that has separate rooms designating life in past centuries.  The rooms in the museum exist at once.  You may have to walk down a long corridor, go in a particular room and out the same door, before you can get to the next adjoining room.  The 18^th-century drawing room may be next to a 12^th-century chapel in this hypothetical museum, but you cannot move through one to the other.  You have to go into the corridor first.

It is difficult to try to explain the creativity of the psyche when, as a species, you have such set ideas about it, but I shall try.

Physically you multiply.  If you have a child, you are not diminished.  You are not less yourself.  You accept parents and grandparents, and see them as individuals, while you yourself are also you as an individual, and yet sprung from the same biological seeds.

Those seeds form the physical races, which are all variations on a theme, or as Ruburt would say, eccentricities of an ever-changing model.  You accept the fact that there are biological connections in terms of family, country, and race, between yourselves and the other individuals on your planet.  The species divides itself up, so to speak, and the members of the different races at any given time distribute themselves in the various lands and continents.  You are used to making organizations.  You say: “This race is thus and so, and we can trace its history through the ages”.  Or:  “That race initiated language”.  Generally speaking, you see certain races as having their own characteristics.  When you do this you often ignore other contradictory tendencies that are not as apparent.  No one, however, feels less a person because of not being in a race by himself or herself.

The children that spring from your loins are real.  They have their own lives.  They share a certain portion of your experience, but they use that experience as they choose.  In your terms, you exist in physical life before your children do.  Now:  In other terms, your own greater personhood exists before you do in the same way.  That greater personhood gives birth to many “psychic children”, who then become physical by being born into the races of men and women.

Each of those children wants to develop its abilities in a particular manner, translating them into earth experience in such a way that all other portions of the earth are also benefited.

The world then is indeed like a theater at any given time, but the play is not preordained or laid out.  It is instead a spontaneous happening in which overall themes are accepted beforehand.  Each “greater personage” takes several parts, or brings forth several psychic children, who spring to life as individual human beings.  These psychic children have as much say in their birth as you have in yours, physically speaking, and that is considerable.

You choose ahead of time your environment and purposes.  This greater personage then has earthly counterparts, each individual alive taking part in the vital human drama of any given century.  Each learns from the others, and the counterparts fit together like mosaics – except that these mosaics are fully endowed with independence and free will.  So the individuals alive upon the body of the earth at any given time fit together as beautifully as the cells do within your individual body at a particular time.

I am not saying that the human personality is “as significant as a cell – no more and no less”.

I am saying that in a way the people alive on the body of the earth have the same kind of relationship, one to another, as the cells have one to the other.

Psychically, you are made up of counterparts, as physically you come from various races.  There are far more counterpart groupings than there are races, but then your definition of races is arbitrary.  Counterparts can be better related to physical families, for you might well have four or five counterparts alive in one century, as you might have four or five family members spanning the same amount of time.  Basically, however, counterparts deal with fulfillments and developments that transcend races or countries.

You are one earth version of your own greater personage.  You are utterly yourself.  That greater identity, however, is intrinsically your own, but is the part that cannot be physically expressed.  Your experiences are your own.  Through you they become a part of the experience of the greater identity, but its reality also “originally” gave you your physical existence, as you gave your children physical life.  Your children are not you, yet once they were contained within the mother’s womb.  Yet they did not originate from the womb either, but from the seed and the egg.

Your individual experience then becomes a part of your own greater personage, but at the same time you unconsciously draw upon the knowledge of that personage and use it for your purposes:  You become an offshoot, so to speak.  You are unconsciously aware of the experiences of “your” counterparts, as they are of yours, and you use that information to round out your own.

Certain abilities can be developed with much greater ease in particular time periods – in a highly industrialized technology, for example – and those interested in that kind of an environment did not generally appear in the eras of the cavemen, simply because those alive at that time were working with different challenges.  So this hypothetical greater identity also chooses to be born in different time periods, historically speaking; and the same pattern appears in which counterparts are born as individuals, each biologically and spiritually connected, but with great intertwinings and variations as with a physical family tree.

In its way, then, each century has its own integrity at all levels.  The identity of each living person is always “brand new”.  Yet its rich psychic heritage connects it through memory and experience to those who will “come after”, or those who have “gone before”.  You are closer to some family members than others, and you are closer to some counterparts than others.

Your parents have physical representations of their memories in terms of photos and letters.  Those memories are not yours, and yet they are a very definite part of your heritage.  In some cases your parents might tell you about events that happened in your own early childhood that you have forgotten.  In a strange way, however, these are not your memories, but those of your parents about you.  You take it on faith that particular events occurred even though you do not recall them.

Those incidents are recorded unconsciously, however, if they applied to your direct experience; and under hypnosis, for example, you could make them your own.  So there are different kinds of memories.  You share certain biological similarities with your parents, but there are other biological groupings not understood, uniting counterparts in any given century.

Organ transplants, for example, could be accepted more easily from counterparts, so that you have a kind of inner subspecies, or subfamily, if you prefer, that operates within the regular physical divisions that you recognize.

Telepathic messages flash more quickly from one counterpart to another.

Some of your counterpart’s memories may appear in your dream states, where they show up as fantasies, perhaps, to you.

These are like psychic snapshots rather than physical ones, involving instances that are a part of your heritage – yours but not yours.  They add to what you are.  They can give you correct information about the “past”, even as your parents’ photographs can tell you about a time in which you did not directly participate (in your terms).  The old photographs will strike a chord within you, however, and so will the psychic memories.

You are always at the center of your life.  Again, your being as you understand it is never annihilated, but continues to develop its own existence in other ways.  A portion of you has lived many lives upon this planet, but the “you” that you know is freshly here, and will never again encounter space and time in precisely the same way.  The same applies to each life lived either before or after.  Biologically you rest upon a heritage, however, and psychically the same applies.  The soul, or this greater personage, does not simply send out an old self in new clothes time and time again, but each time a new, freshly-minted self that then develops and goes its own way.  That self rides firmly, however, in the great flight of experience, and feels within itself all of those other fully unique versions that also fling their way into existence.

… there are no coincidences in any groupings – biological or psychic or social. It is obvious that certain interests bring people together in any club meeting or gathering.  There are reasons, then, why people are born in any given century, and why they meet in space and time.