Concept of Soul

Seth's "Unknown" Reality, volume 2, session 730

 

Usually you think in terms of a hypothetical whole self or consciousness, emerging at birth and disappearing at death.  There are, however, learned arguments in which professors debate such questions.  Some astrologers use the time of conception in their calculations, while others prefer the date of birth.  Various religions have decided that the “soul” enters the fetus at its conception, while others argue that the consciousness cannot be considered a human soul until some time later, just prior to birth.

The same kind of questions occur at the other end of the scale:  When does death actually come?  In most of these debates, this hypothetical self or consciousness is taken as the measure.

In the first place, again, the self or soul in this case is not a thing of measurement – nor is it necessarily some thing that suddenly arrives and then disappears.

The physical self as you know it is a focus of consciousness that forms a personality in response to that focus.  It is very difficult to make analogies here, but I am foolhardy enough to try it.  It seems to you that any naturally aborted fetus has no physical life at all, that such life has been denied to it for some reason.  Instead, the fetus experiences another level: physical life at a different scale, that in your terms would apply to the distant past.

In, I repeat, conventional ideas of evolution, this would be a period in which your kind of consciousness experimented with a water environment, with fins instead of lungs.  In certain terms this gives the consciousness a look at particular portions of the species’ “past”.  It also provides that consciousness with firsthand knowledge psychically and directly.  Again – most difficult to explain!  Particularly without offending your ideas of selfhood – yet each of you “alive” died in just such a manner.

While in conventional terms you think of long centuries’ duration, in which finned creatures rose from the seas, some “becoming” reptiles and finally mammals, many did not make the journey but “fell” along the way.  So in those terms, and following that analogy, the psyche makes the same kind of adjustments and life-changes.  You have each existed many times, then, as fetuses “who did not make it”.  Not necessarily because you did not want to be born, but because those experiences were in themselves legitimate, and in your present state are written in the “memory” of your physical being.

Now this does not mean that your personality as you know it was often trapped within a womb, destined to die there, or that a hypothetical whole self would not be born.  It means that the archaeology of your psyche as it is physically focused carries those experiences.  The self is not like a clay figure coming from a potter’s oven, so that you can say:  “Ah, here is a self, and nothing can be added to it”.  You have always existed as a probable self, though you were not focused in the knowledge of your own experience.  (You may have been focused quite well in other realities, but I am speaking of your earthly existence as you understand it.)

At any point now you can literally become more yourself.  In that regard, you are born by degrees.  In certain terms you have discarded portions of yourself, so you died by degrees – but the two, the living and the dying, occur at once.

To a certain extent what you are was latent in the fetus, but there is no one point when “the full awareness of the soul enters into the flesh”.  The process is gradual.  In physical terms it begins before your own parents are born.

The chart of events at the time of your “birth” is like one small snapshot of someone’s backyard in the afternoon.  Here in this analogy, the entire earthly personality could be compared to the world.  Now as long as you make your deductions according to that one picture, there will be correlations that apply – but only to that small specific area.

In your terms, the person at birth is affected by multidimensional conditions, and the collective position of the planets is but one very minute indication of the other realities involved.  Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality as well [as that of birth].  Your focus of attention forms boundaries that predispose you to believe in a point at which your consciousness emerges, as you understand it, and a point when it is no longer effective, or dies.  Your beliefs in such concepts limit your perception, for by altering the focus of your attention you can to some extent become aware of perception before and after the recognized points of birth and death.

You grant soulhood only to your own species, as if souls had sizes that fit your own natures only.  You preserve these ideas by thinking of animals as beneath you.  Then, however, you must wonder when the soul enters the flesh, or when the alien fetus becomes one of your own, and therefore blessed by the gods and granted a right to life.

But all things have consciousness, and in those terms possess a soul-nature.  There are no gradations as to soul.  Soul is the life within everything that is.  Of course the fetus “has a soul” – but in the same way, if you think in those terms, then each cell within the fetus must be granted a soul.  The course of a cell is not predetermined.  Cells are usually very cooperative, particularly as they form the structures of the body.  But the body is a context that they have chosen to experience.  In fulfilling themselves the cells aid your own existence, but in a framework they have chosen.  They can reject certain elements within their existences, however, change their courses or even form new alliances.  They have great freedom within what you think of as the framework of your reality.  If their paths cannot be charted, and can indeed constantly surprise you, then why do you think that your course can be mapped out ahead of time by reading the positions of the stars at your birth?

The cells are not inferior as far as you are concerned, even though they form part of the structure of your physical being.  They are not even less conscious.  They are conscious in a different fashion.  There is no need to “romanticize” them, or to think of them as little people, but each of them possesses a highly focused consciousness, and a consciousness of self.  You like to think – again – that only your own species possesses an awareness of its own selfhood.  There are different kinds of selfhood, and an infinite variety of ways to experience self-awareness.

As an example, it appears to you that animals do not reflect upon their own reality.  Certainly it seems that a cell has no “objective” knowledge of its own being: as if it is without knowing what it is, or without appreciation of its own issues.  You are quite wrong in such deductions.  Nor are there necessarily gradations in which one kind of consciousness progresses in rigid terms from a lower to a higher state.  Any cell has practical use of precognitive abilities, for example, that quite escape you, yet many of you assign such abilities to “higher” souls.  Each kind of life has its own qualities that cannot be compared with those of others, and that often cannot be communicated.

All of this may seem to have little to do with the nature of reincarnation, as you think of it, or with counterparts as I have explained them.  Yet it is vital that you throw aside old concepts of the self and of the soul before you can begin to understand the freedom of your own selfhood.

This evening Ruburt read some material about dolphins and whales.  It contained strong hints that those creatures are geniuses, possessing the ability of abstract thought to a high degree.  Such is indeed the case.

Now dolphins deal with an entirely different dimension of reality.  There is as yet no method of communication that can allow you to perceive their concepts of selfhood, or their [collective] vision of existence.  They are sensitive, self-aware individuals.  They are altruistic.  They understand the nature of relativity, and they have different ways of passing on information to their young.  They are not higher or lower than your own species.  They simply represent a different kind of selfhood.

Now there is some relationship, at least in terms of our discussion, between the reality of the dolphins and the reality of the fetus.  In your terms the fetus lives in primeval conditions, reminiscent of periods in the species’ past.  It relates in its own way to its environment.  Now for some consciousness this is sufficient.  In your terms, again, for each of you, it was sufficient.

The soul is not a unit that is definable.  It is instead an undefinable quality.  It cannot be broken down or built up, destroyed or expanded, yet it can change affiliation and organization, and its characteristics, while ever remaining itself.

The soul within the fetus cannot be destroyed by any kind of abortion, for instance.  Its progress cannot be charted, for it will always escape such calculations.  Its history is in the future, which always creates the past.

Seth on Astrology

Seth's "Unknown Reality" Volume 2, Session 729

 

As soon as you label yourself you are setting limitations, putting up boundaries and defining the reality of your psyche – usually according to quite limited beliefs.

You think that the self must begin or end someplace.  There must be a fence around it, a yard of identity in which you can feel safe.  I have said many times that there are no limitations to the self.  You seem to be afraid that the self will bleed out and lose “itself” in a maze in which all identity is lost.  Yet you recognize that your self is a far greater dimension than you usually suppose, so you speak in terms of reincarnation.  This allows you to imagine greater realms of identity while still holding your concepts of selfhood intact.  You think of being one self after another, each identity being neatly separated from the others by a passage of years, an obvious death and obvious birth.

The idea of counterparts somewhat shatters that old concept, yet you still want definitions for the self so that you know where you “stand”.  You are so taken with the idea of labels that many follow astrology blindly.  You are born at a certain time, at a certain place, under certain conditions – but consciousness always forms the conditions.  If it is to some extent affected by these conditions, then, it is because the effects follow in the same way that a painter is affected by the landscape that he has himself created.  So you decide to be born, say, in a certain month when the planets are thus-and-so.  Ahead of time, you choose the seasons of your birth.

In the most simple of terms, you are deciding upon the environment.  A violet springs to life in the backyard, but the violet must stay there.  Its whole growth is dependent upon the weather conditions in that particular area, even though those conditions themselves result from overall planetary activity.  You walk out of the place and time of your birth, however, as the flower cannot.

In general terms, probabilities operate to an extent you may not suspect.  For one thing, any focus point of physical life is caused by a merging of probabilities.  Our session is being witnessed by a student, a most intelligent young man.  He also helps Ruburt with correspondence.  Earlier tonight he wrote to a woman who has the same birthdate as Ruburt.  In our last session I compared a year to a ledge on a mountain.  I said that the seasons came and went, and that many crops of spring flowers grew there over a period of time.  So each year, in those terms, is like a ledge.

Say, again, that the year is 1940.  All of those born on a particular date in 1940 will not necessarily be born “at the same time” at all.  What you think of as 1940 is but one season on that ledge, the season that you recognize.  Flowers from the spring of one year “do not see” or mix with the flowers of the following spring, or with those of the spring before.  In the same way, those born in 1940 “at one season” do not, in a greater context, mix with those born in the same year either.

The word “season” here may be misleading.  Each year is like one ledge, however, bringing forth countless variations of the characteristic “flora” growing there.  Each of those separate years, say, each of those 1940’s, or 1920’s, or 1950’s, carries on its own line of development.  Time expands inwardly and outwardly in those terms – it does not just go forward.

Again: Your reality is like a shining platform, a surface resting upon probabilities.  You follow these so unconsciously and beautifully, you swim through them so easily, that it does not occur to you to question your origin, or the medium in which your experience has its existence.  All of these sharing any given birthdate, however, sharing even place as well as time, do not have the same “destiny”; but more, they do not share the same conditions necessarily.  They are each affected by their own probability system at birth, and those conditions drastically alter the nature of their development.

The very practice of pinpointing the time of physical birth at conception itself errs.  There is no point at which you can say in basic terms that an individual is alive, though you do find it more practical to accept certain points of life and death.  It is true that you emerge into space and time at a certain point in your perception.  Your consciousness has been itself long before, however.

In an even larger context, difficult I know for you to follow, the son is the father of his father in quite as valid a way as he is the son, and vice versa.

Once you free your consciousness from limited concepts of time and self, then you can begin to explore the unknown reality that is the unrecognized self.

When you think in conventional terms about astrology, it is as if you are looking at the cover of a book, not realizing that there are many pages within it.

Consciousness, being active within all cellular structures, triggers itself ahead of time [in each case], so to speak, to react to certain conditions and not to others.  Many are born the same day of any given year, and generally within the same time period – but individually the inner triggering may be far different, so that while the overall conditions at birth may appear more or less the same, the inner reactions to them will vary widely.

Some persons will be much more affected by, and sensitive to, other probabilities – which, for instance, do not show at all in conventional astrological “charts”.

Those charts emphasize one line of probabilities at the expense of all others.  Interpretations based upon the charts then will make more sense to those who have chosen the same probable birth circumstances – but they will be of no value to those who were born at the same time, in your terms, but who follow a different order of probabilities.

As the cells operate with the knowledge of probable actions and still maintain the physical body in your chosen system, so the psyche, operating in the same way, “seeds” itself in many different probabilities – alternates, in other words, of the world as you know it.  Those alive with you, your contemporaries, do not all belong to the same probable system.  You are at a meeting ground in that respect, where individuals from many probable realities mix and merge, agreeing momentarily to accept certain portions of the same space-time environment.

Because you focus upon the similarities in experience, and play down the variances, then the oftentimes greater dissimilarities in so-called experience escape you completely.  You take it for granted that memory is faulty if you do not agree with another person on the events that happened at a certain place and time – say those in a recently experienced historical past.  You take it for granted that interpretations of events change, but that certain definite events occurred that are beyond alteration.  Instead, the events themselves are not nearly that concrete.  You accept one probable event.  Someone else may experience instead a version of that event, which then becomes that individual’s felt reality.

These events may be quite different indeed, and the separate interpretations make quite valid explanations of separate variations.  In your terms, one event can happen in many different ways.

All of this is fine theory, esoteric but hardly practical – unless you begin to question the nature of your own thoughts, and begin to explore the reality of those events that you seem to encounter.

Back to our flowers.  Any wildflower on your mountain ledge will view the valley below from its own perspective, and see stretched about it the environment with which it is familiar.  Generally speaking, the flowers born in the same spring will die at about the same time.  The next year the new flowers will see a slightly different landscape, yet the overall patters will be the same.  Violets will grow where there were violets before.  The houses in the valley will be in the same “place”.  If you looked at that same landscape one summer and then the next, you might say: “Ah, the violets always grow there, and it is good to see the lilies of the valley in the shadow of the same rock”.  You might realize that the flower you pick are not the same flowers that you picked last year at the same spot, but the very nature of your focus would cause you to concentrate upon those differences only when you were forced to.  Otherwise you would think: “Violets are violets, and they are always here each spring”.

The vast unexplainable difference that exists as far as the flowers are concerned is something else again – for on that scale the flowers that you pick are utterly themselves in their own world, from which to a certain extent you have taken them.

Unimaginable differences would be present if those posies could see the same environment of the year before, and all of the minute variations that you ignore would be gigantic; different enough indeed so that at their level the flowers might think that a different kind of reality was involved.  So there are variations, and the highly significant probabilities, operating even between those born generally in the same month of the year – not only in terms of exterior conditions, but of inward ones.

Consciousness does not simply choose to be born at a certain place in space and time, but it also endows its physical organism ahead of time with certain inner triggers so that it will respond to those conditions in highly individualistic ways.

I am not even hinting at predestination or predetermination.  Let us try another simple analogy.  A seed “knows” that it will come to life in the middle of a pot in someone’s living room.  Say it is a tomato seed, and our house owner decides to start a plant from scratch.  All cellular life is precognitive, in your terms.  The seed then knows that the sun comes, say, from the west in this particular room.  It begins to respond in that manner before the shoot emerges.

The shoot does not simply react to the direction from which the sun shines, but senses this far before, and the seed sensitizes itself “ahead of time” to those conditions.  It could grow to the east just as well.  The trigger is not the sun’s direction on its own, but the plant’s innate knowledge of that direction.  The plant is not predestined to grow toward the east, for example.

In the same manner, the self knows ahead of time the best conditions for its own development, in light of the time and the place of its chosen birth.  It has, however, literally endless probabilities to choose from, to fulfill its abilities while maintaining a workable selfhood.  Consciousness chooses the best overall conditions available for its own purposes of growth.  It then preconditions its own organism to respond or not to respond to the time and place of birth, to exaggerate or minimize, to negate or accept.

The emergence of consciousness into those physical conditions automatically alters them – a fact not recognized by astrologers.  Each child born alters the entire universe, and changes the world of its time and birth by bringing into it action not there earlier, in your terms, and by impressing the universe with the stamp – the indelible stamp – of its reality.  Each child chooses its own probable version of any given birthdate.  Such dates are obviously not just points in time, pinpointed in space.  In the first place, since all time is simultaneous, you are always dying and being born, and your later experience affects the time of your birth.

I admit that a birthday operates as a handy reference.  But if you realized that your consciousness did exist before that time, your memory will open up, and your accepted birthdate will appear far less important.  “Coming out of the womb” is an event, and much better to use than “birth”.  In greater terms – far greater terms than you imagine – you are aware of probable “births”, and your other parentages [that are] quite as legitimate as the personal history you now accept.

The self is not limited.  The true meaning of that statement may sometime dawn.  The idea of one personhood still closes your eyes to the greater multipersonhood that is your true reality.  Often your dreams give you a hint of this kind of experience.

You view the heavens and the universe, the planets and the stars, from your own focus – a highly limited one in certain terms.

In the first place you are looking at one version of the universe, as it seems to exist at the moment of your perception.  The entire nature of a personality cannot be considered in its totality in that small context.

The personality itself is not only independent of space and time, but uses the illusions that result for its own purposes.  All things are related, but they do not act in a certain way because the planets were such-and-such at your birth.  There is a relationship, but it is not causal.

It is quite as true to say that the planets behave in a certain way because you are what you are, as it is to turn the statement around, as is generally done.  The very positions of the planets and the stars are effects of the senses – perceptions that would have no meaning were it not for your own kind of consciousness.  Those perceptions, then, cannot cause you to behave in any given way because of conditions that have no meaning outside of your own consciousness.

The universe exists, but it takes the shape and form that you recognize only in your own perceptions.  The motion of the planets, indeed their very perceived reality, exists in far different terms.

The universe is seeded with various kinds of consciousnesses.  Some of these appear to you as planets or stars, as they “intrude” into your field of actuality.  As such they appear to behave in a certain fashion, to take a certain form, to have certain effects.  You and the stars are simultaneous events, each conscious and aware but in different “scales” of actuality – as your scale of consciousness is different from that of the violets.

With physical perception the picture all fits, of course.  You realize that someone – some interested observer – viewing the earth from another planet in another galaxy, would be seeing what you think of as earth’s past.  But as I pointed out, “he” might also be seeing earth’s future, according to “his” viewpoint.  This would in no way alter your reality.  The positions of the stars and planets, however and your time scheme, cannot be depended upon to give an indication of “causal” effects.  The personality simply exists in greater terms.

Using conventional astrology, you will find certain correlations, because of particular events occurring, that are indeed interrelated.  Yet many individuals will not discover semblances of themselves in the charts of astrology simply because their chosen probabilities are, qualitatively speaking, so different from the “norm”.

When astrology works, it works because the astrologer is using his or her creative and psychic abilities, and then projecting that knowledge into a pattern that is of itself too small to contain it.  The chart then simply becomes an aid.

I understand that some of this will be difficult to follow.  The only other recourse, however, is to repeat myths and tales that you have outgrown.  The stars and planets simply are in more than one place at one time.  I admit that your perception of them makes them appear to be relatively stable, and you are biologically tuned in to that perception.  Your experience of time and motion, as you know, is relative, and in comparison with your own relatively brief lives the planets seem to endure for almost endless periods.  This is your viewpoint as you look out from your ledge.

Other minute creatures might well mark portions of their lives with your coming and going, and imagine that your position at their birth regulated their activity.  Imagine them making up charts correlating their lives with your own.  Are you in the habit of pacing the floor?  In another scale of time, how many ages might it seem to take for your shadow to cross from one side of the room to another?  The analogy is not as farfetched as it may seem, for certainly your shadow will affect the temperature of the room minutely, and alter other conditions there in ways you would never comprehend, often causing gigantic variations to a consciousness on another scale.

An imaginary ant, a philosophical one, might sit and in its own way contemplate how often you walked the floor in a period that might seem like a year to it.  It might try to calculate your next passage ahead of time, so that – prudent ant! – it could run “out of the way” in time to avoid your footsteps.

Your rumbling tread might shake its tiny home beneath certain floorboards, or in the crevices between.  I admit that I am stretching our ant tale here, but imagine further that our little fellow becomes familiar with everyone in, say, an apartment house, learning to recognize all of the footsteps that go up and down the stairs.  Our philosopher keeps in touch with the other ants, until with time and work and patience, a chart is made and calculations drawn.  An ant born at three o’clock in the afternoon, when Miss X comes home with her boyfriend, is apt to have a hard time of it – for the couple runs about exuberantly, shaking all of the establishment, and tumbling the dust in the inner crevices.

I am not comparing astrologers with ants.  I am, however, trying to show you that you are not ruled by the stars – and that when you behave as if you are, then you are showing as little comprehension of your true position as our ant did.  You are small in relationship to the stars, also, but when you seek to place your fate in their hands, figuratively speaking, then it does seem as if you have little control over your own destiny.

You are consciousness at particular points of experience, and in other kinds of reality you twinkle like stars.

Mountain and Flower Metaphors

Seth's The "Unknown" Reality, Volume Two, Session 728

 

While mountains generally maintain a more or less permanent position, in your terms, the vegetation that grows on the different levels change.  New flowers come each spring.  You may always find a patch of violets in the same general position in the foothills each year, for example; yet they are not the same violets that grew last season, or that will appear next season.

The pattern for those flowers serves to seed each new batch.  All kinds of alterations also take place in the soil beneath the mountain’s layers.  So, while different ledges may appear more or less the same, this sameness is the result of minute changes, new growths and seasonal variations.

For our analogy, now, think of the various ledges or levels of the mountain as different time periods.  It seems to you as if one reincarnational existence would be layered above the other.  You may be able to see that those existences, like the mountain, would exist at once, but you might forget that there is endless creativity and change at all levels of the mountain.  New vegetation grows at the bottom layers, for example, as well as the top ones.

Time periods are natural and creative.  They are like the levels of the mountain, bringing forth fresh life.  They do not vanish when you are finished with your growth there, but serve as a growing media for other personalities.

Time periods themselves, then, are somewhat like platforms – natural platforms – that serve ‘time and time again’ to bring forth fresh life.  Because of your viewpoint this is highly difficult [for you] to understand.  Say you were born in 1940.  It seems to you that 1940 is gone, though it was the time of your birth.  Returning to our analogy, however: You are like one violet, born in one spring on one ledge, here, 1940.  Other people are being born in 1940 now, in a different “season”.

You are only aware of your own position within time, or your own place on the “platform”, or the ledge as you understand it.  Not only do these ledges or platforms of time exist simultaneously, but each one brings forth its own batches of personalities in its own different seasons.  To that degree you are aware of your own season only, and we will call it the physical one – the particular probable reality that you accept as real.

The ledge of 1940, however, is still as immediate and now and present as it was when you were born.

Other personalities, again, are being born “there”, but their season or reality is different than yours.

Psychically you are somewhat related, in the same way for instance that the violets that grow this year in one spot are related to all violets that have grown – or will ever grow – from (or on) the same spot.  Each moment, each year, has other dimensions, therefore, that you do not comprehend as yet.  To you, other people born now in 1940 would be born in a probable reality.  Yet you share the same bed, so to speak.  When you look at an object you see its exterior, and when you experience time you perceive its exterior.

The year 1940, then, continues to exist as the mountain ledge continues to exist, and it brings forth new creativity “each season”.  The violets on our hypothetical mountainside contribute to the life of the mountain even while they have their own independent reality, and the overall cycle of the seasons regulates the growth and development of the mountain and all of its manifestations.

Time multiplies from within itself.  When you think in terms of reincarnation, you are still dealing with very simple time concepts.  You accept, if you were born in 1940, a particular historical sequence: but others born in 1940 (in a different season than your own), are born into a different historical context, a different 1940, with its own probable events.  You always think of being reincarnated in terms of being born backward into a history of which you have read.  But any given year has its own variations.

In a way you seed yourself into time.  But you could choose to be born five “times” in 1940, and each existence would be entirely separate, as you probed into the probable realities existing for you in the variations of that period.

As a physical being, your beliefs and concepts form your reality.  The psyche from which your identity springs is free of the picture of reality that you have chosen.  You choose, in other words, to accept a given picture of the world, and you use that picture as a frame within which you form a life.

If you think in conventional terms about reincarnation, then you might examine a book in which each page is a life.  You read the book from the beginning, so you think of one life or page following another.  You should be able to see that the entire book exists at once.  But in larger terms it is just one volume that you, the greater psyche, are reading, told in terms of serial time.

Instead, you are not only reading but writing many such books of living experience, that represent existences.  Creativity is endless, and the psyche is the greatest source of creativity.  Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character.  This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters – and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality.  That is a truer picture of your position.

Physically, the seeds of a plant fall onto the earth.  They may be blown to some place distant from their birth, but the psyche’s “seeds” fly into other realities also.  Within all of this, however, there is the finest balance between spontaneity and order.  Violets do not grow in wintertime.  Their characteristics appear only when certain conditions are met.  So if you were born in 1940 you have no trouble keeping track of your own time, and you fulfill your life under the same general conditions as those in which you were born.

Cells retain their shape and integrity, and their position more or less within your organs, although the atoms and molecules within them change.  The overall pattern continues, however, so that your body retains its familiarity even as, in other terms, the mountain maintains its form.  The cells serve as patterns of development on the one hand, through which atoms and molecules express their being.  Each category is dependent upon the others.  So your own consciousness follows a certain line of development that is its own, and that recognizes its own “seasons”.  Other offshoots of yourself, in your terms, operate following their own orders in times quite apart from your own.

The roots of the tiniest plant know the best conditions for their growth, and they reach spontaneously toward the most fulfilling probabilities for development.

At each moment they sense their position.  They are familiar with the most insignificant motion of the earth about them.  They grow downward even while the stem grows upward – and the flower has not yet seen the space into which it will grow.  What knowledge then resides within those roots, and what precognitive ability, that the plant itself yearns toward fulfillment that is as yet not achieved.

Is the psyche then any less miraculous?  And does not each of my readers possess the same innate capacity?  You have within yourselves the same yearning for your own greatest flowering.  You are multidimensional, however, so you grow in different kinds of realities, sending petals of yourself into other times and places, and you have the ability to mature in environments that are quite different one from the others.

In terms of your reality only, however, you seem to come to bloom through the seasons of the earth, and in your terms only, through consecutive periods.  You are like a flower bulb that each time gives birth to a different blossom, while still conforming to certain overall patterns – but each blossom is entirely new.  Because you think in terms of time sequences, it is natural for you to think of your psychic lineage in the same way.  Each flowering of the bulb, however, brings about a different expression.  You were not your past “self”, therefore, though you shared a certain relationship.

You see the flower bulb as it exists from your own perspective.  Yet, being multidimensional, you bloom in many other dimensions also.  You have to walk around a plant on a table in order to see it from all sides.  So, figuratively, walk around “time” to see yourself from all angles, and to perceive all of your own manifestations.

In certain terms, for instance, I am a future of Ruburt, but the “past is always freshly creative.  Ruburt’s life as he knows it is not in my memory – because I did different things when I was Ruburt.  And he is not bound by that reality that was mine.

I have memories of being Ruburt – but the Ruburt I was is not the Ruburt that Ruburt is in his reality.  He surprises me, and his reactions alter my past.  In his terms I am a future self, with far greater knowledge, yet he uses that knowledge to alter his present reality; and when I was Ruburt I did not have that knowledge.  You can say then that I am altering my own past, but Ruburt’s present experience also changes my present experience – and so there is an unending interchange.

The same kind of interrelationship occurs with each individual now alive, in your terms, whether or not conscious awareness is involved.  Ruburt is exploring time as he probes the reality of his own psyche, then.

You must begin any study from your own viewpoint, from your own ledge, but your personal living experience is always the main source of information.  Within you as you know yourself are all of the hints you need, if you are but willing to follow them; and these will not destroy the fabric of physical reality, but instead show you more clearly the structure of its miraculous patterns.