Reincarnational Dramas

Seth Speaks, Session 521

Reincarnational Dramas

Your own environment includes far more than you may have supposed.  Earlier I referred to your environment in terms of the daily physical existence and surroundings with which you are currently connected.  In actuality, you are aware of very little of your larger, more extensive environment.  Consider your present self as an actor in a play; hardly a new analogy, but a suitable one.  The scene is set in the twentieth century.  You create the props, the settings, the themes; in fact you write, produce, and act in the entire production – you and every other individual who takes part.

You are so focused in your roles, however; so intrigued by the reality that you have created, so entranced by the problems, challenges, hopes, and sorrows of your particular roles that you have forgotten they are of your own creation.  This intensely moving drama, with all its joys and tragedies, can be compared with your present life, your present environment, both individually and en masse.

But there are other plays going on simultaneously, in which you also have a part to play.  These have their own scenery, their own props.  They take place in different periods of time.  One may be called “Life in the twelfth century A.D.”.  One may be called “Life in the eighteenth century”, or “in 500 B.C.”, or “in A.D. 3000”.  You also create these plays and act in them.  These settings also represent your environment, the environment that surrounds your entire personality.

I am speaking of the portion of you who is taking part in this particular period piece, however; and that particular portion of your entire personality is so focused within this drama that you are not aware of the others in which you also play a role.  You do not understand your own multidimensional reality; therefore it seems strange or unbelievable when I tell you that you live many existences at one time.  It is difficult for you to imagine being in two places at once, much less in two or more times, or centuries.

Now stated simply, time is not a series of moments.  The words that you speak, the acts that you perform, appear to take place in time, as a chair or table appears to take up space.  These appearances however are a part of the complicated props that you have set up “beforehand”, and within the play you must accept these as real.

Four o’clock in the afternoon is a very handy reference.  You can say to a friend, “I will meet you at four o’clock at the corner”, or at a restaurant, for a drink or a chat or a meal, and your friend will know precisely where and when he will find you.  This will happen despite the fact that four o’clock in the afternoon has no basic meaning, but is an agreed-upon designation – a gentlemen’s agreement, if you prefer.  If you attend the theatre at nine o’clock in the evening, but the actions of the play take place within the morning hours, and the actors are shown eating breakfast, you accept the time as given within the theatre’s play.  You also pretend that it is morning.

Each of you are now involved in a much larger production, in which you all agree on certain basic assumptions that serve as a framework within which the play can occur.  The assumptions are that time is a series of moments one after another; that an objective world exists quite independently of your own creation and perception of it; that you are bound within the physical bodies that you have donned; and that you are limited by time and space.

Other assumptions accepted for the same reason include the idea that all perception comes through your physical senses; in other words, that all information comes from without, and that no information can come from within.  You therefore are forced to focus intensely upon the actions of the play.  Now these various plays, these creative period pieces represent what you would call reincarnational lives.

They all exist basically at one time.  Those who are still involved in these highly complicated passion-play seminars called reincarnational existences, find it difficult to see beyond them.  Some, resting between productions, as it were, try to communicate with those who are still taking part; but they themselves are merely in the wings, so to speak, and can only see so far.

The plays seem to be taking place one before the other, and so these communications seem to intensify the false idea that time is a series of moments, passing in a single line from some inconceivable beginning to some equally inconceivable end.

This leads you to think in terms of a very limited progress, both in individual terms and in terms of your species as a whole.  You think, those of you who have even considered reincarnation, “Well, certainly the race must have progressed from the time of the Middle Ages”, although you greatly fear it has not; or you turn to technological progress and say, “At least we have come a long way in that direction.”

You may smile and think to yourself that it is quite difficult to imagine a Roman senator addressing the multitudes through a microphone, for example; his children, watching his performance on television.  But all of this is highly misleading.  Progress does not exist in the terms that you consider it to, any more than time does.

In each play, both individually and en masse, different problems are set up.  Progress can be measured in terms of the particular ways in which those problems were solved or not solved.  Great advances have been made in certain periods.  For example, great offshoots appeared from your viewpoint you might not consider progress at all.

In some plays, generally speaking, actors are each working on a seemingly minute portion of a larger problem that the play itself is to resolve.

Though I use the analogy here of a drama, these “plays” are highly spontaneous affairs in which the actors have full freedom within the play’s framework.  And granting these assumptions that have been stated, there are no rehearsals.  There are observers, as you will see later in our book.  As in any good theatre production, there is an overall theme within each play.  The great artists, for example, did not emerge out of a particular time simply because they were born into it, or because the conditions were favorable.

The play itself was concerned with the actualization of intuitive truth into what you would call artistic form, with a creativity of such vast and sweeping results that it would serve to awaken latent abilities within each actor and to serve as a model of behavior.

Periods of renaissance – spiritual, artistic, or psychic – occur because the intense inner focus of those involved in the drama are directed toward those ends.  The challenge may be different in each play, but the great themes are beacons to all consciousness.  They serve as models.

Progress has nothing to do with time, you see, but with psychic and spiritual focus.  Each play is entirely different from any other.  It is not correct, therefore, to suppose that your actions in this life are caused by a previous existence, or that you are being punished in this life for crimes in a past one.  The lives are simultaneous.

Your own multidimensional personality is so endowed that it can have these experiences and still retain its identity.  It is, of course, affected by the various plays in which it takes part.  There is instant communication and an instant, if you prefer, feedback system.

These plays are hardly without purpose.  In them the multidimensional personality learns through its own actions.  It tries out an endless variety of poses, behavior patterns, attitudes, and changes others as a result.

The word “result”, you see, automatically infers cause and effect – the cause happening before the effect, and this is simply one small example of the strength of such distortions, and of the inherent difficulties involved with verbal thought, for it always implies a single-line delineation.

You are the multidimensional self who has these existences, who creates and takes part in these cosmic passion plays, so to speak.  It is only because you focus in this particular role now that you identify your entire being with it.  You have set these rules for yourself for a reason.  And consciousness is in a state of becoming, and so this multidimensional self of which I speak is not a psychological structure completed and done with.  It is also in a state of becoming.

It is learning the art of actualization.  It has within it infinite sources of creativity, unlimited possibilities of development.  But it has yet to learn the means of actualization, and must find within itself ways to bring into existence those untold creations that are within it.

Therefore it creates varieties of conditions in which to operate, and sets itself challenges, some doomed to failure in your terms, at least initially, because it must first create the conditions which will bring new creations about.  And all of this is done with great spontaneity and unbounded joy.

You therefore create far more environments than you realize.  Now, each actor, going about the role, focused within the play, has an inner guide line.  He is not left, therefore, abandoned within a play that he has forgotten in his own creation.  He has knowledge and information that comes to him through what I call the inner senses.

He has other sources of information, therefore, than those strictly given within the confines of the production.  Each actor knows this instinctively, and there are periods set and allowed for within the play itself in which each actor retires in order to refresh himself.  In these he is informed through the inner senses of his other roles, and he realizes that he is far more than the self appearing in any given play.

In these periods he understands that he had his hand in the writing of the play, and he is freed from those assumptions that bind him while he is actively concerned with the drama’s activities.  These periods, of course, coincide with your sleep states and dreaming conditions; but there are also other times when each actor sees quite clearly that he is surrounded by props, and when his vision suddenly pierces the seeming reality of the production.

This does not mean that the play is not real, or that it should not be taken seriously.  It does mean playing a role – an important one.  Each actor must of himself realize, however, the nature of the production and his part in it.  He must actualize himself out of the three-dimensional confines of the play’s setting.

There is great cooperation behind such momentous productions, and in playing his role, each actor first actualizes himself within three-dimensional reality.  The multidimensional self cannot act within three-dimensional reality until it materializes a portion of itself within it.

Within this reality, it then brings about all kinds of creativity and development that could not appear otherwise.  It must then propel itself from this system however, through another act, another actualization on the part of itself that is three-dimensional.

During its three-dimensional existence it has helped others in ways that they could not otherwise be helped, and it has been itself benefited and developed in ways that would be impossible otherwise.

The meaning of the play is within you, therefore.  It is only the conscious portion of you that acts so well, and that is focused so securely within the props of the production.

The purpose of any given life is available to you, the knowledge beneath the surface of the conscious self you know.  All kinds of hints and clues are also available.  You have the knowledge of your entire multidimensional personality at your fingertips.  When you realize that you do, this knowledge allows you to solve the problems or meet the challenges you have set, quicker, in your terms; and also opens further areas of creativity by which the entire play or production can be enriched.

To the extent, therefore, that you allow the intuitions and knowledge of the multidimensional self to flow through the conscious self, to that extent not only do you perform your role in the play more effectively, but also you add new energy, insights, and creativity to the entire dimension.

Now it seems to you, of course, that you are the only conscious part of yourself, for you are identifying with the actor in this particular production.  The other portions of your multidimensional personality, in these other reincarnational plays, are also conscious, however.  And because you are a multidimensional consciousness, “you” are also conscious in other realities beside these.

Your multidimensional personality, your true identity, the real you, is conscious of itself, as itself, in any of these roles.

Manifestation

Seth Speaks, Session 520

Manifestation

Your scientists are finally learning what philosophers have known for centuries – that mind can influence matter.  They still have to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body.  It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing.  Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth.  Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

Quite literally, the “inner self” forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts.  You grow the body.  Its condition perfectly mirrors your subjective state at any given time.  Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.

You are intuitively aware that you form your image, and that you are independent of it.  You do not realize that you create your larger environment and the physical world as you know it by propelling your thoughts and emotions into matter – a breakthrough into three-dimensional life.  The inner self, therefore, individually and en masse, sends its psychic energy out, forming tentacles that coalesce into form.

Each emotion and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique.  It is highly equipped to combine with certain others, according to the various ranges of intensity that you may include.  In a manner of speaking, three-dimensional objects are formed in somewhat the same way that the images you see on your television screen are formed, but with a large difference.  And if you were not tuned into that particular frequency, you will not perceive the physical objects at all.

Each of you act as transformers, unconsciously, automatically transforming highly sophisticated electromagnetic units into physical objects.  You are in the middle of a “matter-concentrated system”, surrounded, so to speak, by weaker areas in which what you would call “pseudomatter” persists.  Each thought and emotion spontaneously exists as a simple or complex electromagnetic unit – unperceived, incidentally, as yet by your scientists.

The intensity determines both the strength and the permanency of the physical image into which the thought or emotion will be materialized.  In my own material I am explaining this in depth.  Here, I merely want you to understand that the world that you know is the reflection of an inner reality.

You are made basically of the same ingredients as a chair, a stone, a head of lettuce, a bird.  In a gigantic cooperative endeavor, all consciousness joins together to make the forms that you perceive.  Now, because this is known to us, we can change our environments and our own physical forms as we wish, and without confusion, for we perceive the reality that lies beneath.

We also realize the permanency of form is an illusion, since all consciousness must be in a state of change.  We can be, in your terms, in several places at once because we realize the true mobility of consciousness.  Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form.  This form, projecting outward from your own consciousness, completely escapes your egotistical attention.  When I think emotionally of someone else, I do the same thing, except that a portion of my consciousness is within the image, and can communicate.

Environments are primarily mental creations of consciousness thrust out into many forms.  I have a fourteenth-century study, my favorite, with which I am very pleased, for example.  In your physical terms it does not exist, and I know quite well it is my mental production.  Yet I enjoy it, and often take a physical form in order to sit at the desk and look out the window at the countryside.

Now you do the same thing when you sit in your living room, but you do not realize what you are doing; and presently you are somewhat restricted.  When my associates and I meet, we often translate each other’s thoughts into various shapes and forms out of pure enjoyment in the practice.  We have what you might call a game, demanding some expertise, where for our own amusement we see which of us can translate any given thought into the most numerous forms.

There are such subtle qualities affecting the nature of all thought, such emotional gradations, that no one is ever identical – and incidentally, no physical object in your system is an exact duplicate of any other.  The atoms and molecules that compose it – any object – have their own identities that color and qualify any object that they form.

You accept and perceive and focus upon continuities and similarities as you perceive physical objects of any kind, and in a very important manner you shut out and ignore dissimilarities out of a given field of actuality.  Therefore you are very highly discriminating, accepting certain qualities and ignoring others.  Your bodies not only change completely every seven years, for example.  They change constantly with each breath.

Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced.  The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration.  Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves.  The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive entity.  Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self.  You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from “past” experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were “characteristic” and now are vanished – ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought.  The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent physical and subjective self in order to maintain a relatively constant, relatively permanent environment.  So you are always in a position of ignoring such changes.  Those that you refuse to acknowledge are precisely those that would give you a much better understanding of the true nature of reality, individual subjectivity, and the physical environment that seems to surround you.

What happens to a thought when it leaves your conscious mind?  It does not simply disappear.  You can learn to follow it, but you are usually frightened of turning your attention away from its intense focus in three-dimensional existence.  Therefore, it seems that the thought disappears.  It seems also that your subjectivity has a mysterious unknown quality about it, and that even your mental life has a sort of insidious dropping-off point, a subjective cliff over which thoughts and memories fall, to disappear into nothingness.  Therefore to protect yourself, to protect your subjectivity from drifting, you erect various psychological barriers at what you suppose to be the danger points.  Instead, you see, you can follow these thoughts and emotions simply by realizing that your own reality continues in another direction, beside the one with which you mainly identify.  For these thoughts and emotions that have left your conscious mind will lead you into other environments.

These subjective openings through which thoughts seem to disappear are in fact like psychic warps, connecting the self that you know with other universes of experience – realities where symbols come to life and thoughts are not denied their potential.

There is communication between these other realities and your own in your dream states, and a constant interaction between both systems.  If there is any point where your own consciousness seems to elude you or escape you, or if there is any point where your consciousness seems to end, then these are the points where you have yourselves set up psychological and psychic barriers, and these are precisely those areas that you should explore.  Otherwise you feel as if your consciousness is enclosed within your skull, immobile and constricted, and every lost thought or forgotten memory at least symbolically seems like a small death.  And such is not the case.

Physical Reality is Illusion and We Are More Than Consciousness

Seth Speaks, Session 519

Physical Space Is An Illusion

Now your ideas of space are highly erroneous.  So in my contacts with your sphere of activity, I do not sweep through bright golden skies like some spiritual superman into your physical domain.

I will go into this in a later chapter, but in a very real manner, space as you perceive it simply does not exist.  Not only is the illusion of space caused by your own physical perceptive mechanisms, but it is also caused by mental patterns that you have accepted – patterns that are adopted by consciousness when it reaches a certain stage of “evolution” within your system.

When you arrive, or emerge, into physical life, not only is your mind not a blank slate, waiting for the scrolls that experience will write upon it, but you are already equipped with a memory bank far surpassing that of any computer.  You face your first day upon the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.

You may think of your soul or entity – though only briefly and for the sake of analogy – as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes.  But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments.  It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed.  Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole.  I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment – in your case in physical reality – but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

Now there is a purpose in all this that will also be discussed later.  I mention this whole subject here, however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real in the terms that you imagine it to be.  When you are born, then, you are already “conditioned” to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but intense range.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate.  There is no space between my environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that separate us.  In a very real way of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts – and the facts are difficult to explain.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and space.  The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you.  Basically, however, this is an illusion.  Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way.  The universe as you know it is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality.  The events are mental.  This does not mean that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to hold books, glasses, and oranges although the table has no solid qualities of its own.

When I enter your system, I move through a series of mental and psychic events.  You would interpret these events as space and time, and so often I must use the terms, for I must use your language rather than my own.

Root Assumptions

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke – those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence.  Space and time, for example, are root assumptions.  Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements.  When I communicate within your system, I must use and understand the root assumptions upon which it is based.  As a teacher it is part of my job to understand and use these, and I have had existences in many such systems as a part of what you may call my basic training; though in your terms my associates and I had other names for them.

Soul/Entity Is More Than Consciousness

The entity, or the soul, has a far more creative and complicated nature than even your religions have ever granted it.

It utilizes numberless methods of perception, and it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness.  Your idea of the soul is indeed limited by your three-dimensional concepts.  The soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head.  Now in my level of existence I am simply aware of the fact, strange as it may seem, that I am not my consciousness.  My consciousness is an attribute to be used by me.  This applies to each of the readers of this book, even though the knowledge may be hidden.  Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction, therefore.  In one way, I translate what I am into an event that you can understand to some extent.  In a much more limited manner, any artist does the same thing when he translates what he is, or a portion of it, into a painting.  There is at least an evocative analogy there.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, and you must interpret what happens in the light of your own root assumptions.  Now whether or not you realize it, each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states without the full participation of your normally conscious self.  In subjective experience you leave behind physical existence and act, at times, with strong purpose and creative validity within dreams that you forget the instant you awaken.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.

When I contact your reality, therefore, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams.  I can be aware of myself as I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, and yet also be aware of myself in my own environment; for I send only a portion of myself here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you write a letter to a friend, and yet are aware of the room in which you sit.  I send out much more than you do in a letter, for a portion of my consciousness is now within the entranced woman as I dictate, but the analogy is close enough.

My environment, as I mentioned earlier, is not one of a personality recently dead in your terms, but later I will describe what you can expect under those conditions.  One large difference between your environment and mine is that you must physically materialize mental acts as physical matter.  We understand the reality of mental acts and recognize their brilliant validity.  We accept them for what they are, and therefore we are beyond the necessity to materialize them and interpret them in such a rigid manner.

Your earth was very dear to me.  I can now turn the focus of my consciousness toward it, and if I choose, experience it as you do; but I can also perceive it in many ways that you cannot in your time.

Now some of you who read this book will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses.  Remember also that if physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality.  The illusion itself has a purpose and a meaning.

Perhaps it is better to say that physical reality is one form that reality takes.  In your system, however, you are focused much more intensely upon one relatively small aspect of experience.

We can travel freely through varying numbers of such realities.  Our experience at this point includes our work in each.  I do not mean to minimize the importance of your present personalities, nor of physical existence.  To the contrary.

Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable place of training.  Your personality as you now know it will indeed persevere, and with its memories, but it is only a part of your entire identity, even as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, though now you are far more than a child.

You will continue to grow and develop, and you will become aware of other environments, even as you left your childhood home.  But environments are not objective things, conglomerations of objects that exist independently of you.  Instead you form them and they are quite literally extensions of yourself; materialized mental acts that extend outward from your consciousness.

I will tell you exactly how you form your environment.  I form mine following the same rules, though you end up with physical objects and I do not.

Now I will begin, there, on our book at our next session.