Reincarnation, Dreams, and the Hidden Male and Female Within the Self

Seth Speaks, Session 555

Reincarnation, Dreams, and the Hidden Male and Female Within the Self

As I mentioned earlier, each person lives both male and female lives.  As a rule, conscious memory of these is not retained.  To prevent an over-identification of the individual with his present sex, within the male there resides an inner personification of femaleness.  This personification of femaleness in the male is the true meaning of what Jung called the “anima”.

The anima in the male is, therefore, the psychic memory and identification of all the previous female existences in which the inner self has been involved.  It contains within it the knowledge of the present male’s past female histories, and the intuitive understanding of all the female qualities with which the personality is innately endowed.

The anima, therefore, is an important safeguard, preventing the male from over-identifying with whatever cultural male characteristics have been imposed upon him through present background, environment, and education.  The anima serves not only as a personal but as a mass-civilizing influence, mellowing strongly aggressive tendencies and serving also as a bridge both in communicating with women in a family relationship, and in communication also as it is applied through the arts and verbalization.

The male will often dream of himself, therefore, as a female.  The particular way in which he does so, can tell him much about his own reincarnational background in which he operated as a female.  Maleness and femaleness are obviously not opposites, but merging tendencies.  The priestess, the mother, the young witch, the wife, and the old wise woman – these general types are archetypes, simply because they are “root elements” representing, symbolically, the various kinds of so-called female qualities and the various kinds of female lives that have been lived by males.

They have also been lived by females, of course.  However, the women do not need to be reminded of their femaleness, but again, so that they do not over-identify with their present sex, there is what Jung called the “animus”, or the hidden male within the woman.

Again, however, this represents the male lives with which the self has been involved – the young boy, the priest, the aggressive “jungle man”, and the wise old man.  These are types, representing generally and symbolically past male lives lived by present women.  Women, therefore, can learn much about their reincarnational past as men, through studying those dreams in which these types appear, or in which they themselves appear as men.

Through the anima and the animus, so-called, present personalities are able to draw upon the knowledge and intuitions and background that was derived from past existences as the opposite sex.  On some occasions, for example, the woman may go overboard and exaggerate female characteristics, in which case the animus or male within comes to her aid, bringing through dream experiences an onrush of knowledge that will result in compensating male-like reactions.

The same applies to a male when he over-identifies with what he believes to be male characteristics, for whatever reason.  The anima or woman within will rouse him to make compensating actions, causing an upsurge of intuitive abilities, bringing a creative element to offset aggressiveness.

Ideally, left alone, these operations would result in a balance individually and en masse, where aggressiveness was always used creatively, as indeed it can and should be.

The animus and the anima are, of course, highly charged psychically, but the origin of this psychic charge and the inner fascination are the result of a quite legitimate inner identification with these personified other-sex characteristics.

They not only have a reality in the psyche, however, but they are imbedded in genetically codified data by the inner self – a genetic memory of past psychic events – transposed into the genetic memory of the very cells that compose the body.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved.  Now the present characteristics usually overshadow the past ones.  They are dominant, but the other characteristics are latent and present, built into the pattern.  The physical pattern of the present body, therefore, is a genetic memory of the self’s past physical forms, and of their strengths and weaknesses.

I will try to put this as simply as possible.  There are presently invisible layers within the body, the topmost layer that you see representing, of course, the present physical form.  But enmeshed within this there are what amount to invisible layers, “shadow”, latent layers that represent previous physical images that have belonged to the personality.

They are kept in abeyance, so to speak.  They are connected electromagnetically to the atomic structure of the present body.  To your way of thinking, they would be unfocused.  They are a part of your psychic heritage, however.  Often you can call up a past strength of a previous body, to help compensate for a present weakness.  The body does not only carry memory biologically of its own past condition in this life therefore, but indelibly with it, even physically, are the memories of the other bodies that the personality has formed in previous reincarnations.

The anima and animus are closely connected with these interior body images.  These body images are highly charged psychically, and also appear in the dream state.  They operate as compensations and reminders to prevent you from over-identifying yourself with your present physical body.

They are, of course, both male and female.  When you are ill, in the dream state you often have experiences in which you seem to be someone else with an entirely healthy body.  Often such a dream is therapeutic.  An “older” reincarnational body has come to your aid, from which you draw strength through the memory of its health.

Reincarnational Relationships (2)

Seth Speaks, Session 551

Reincarnational Relationships (2)

In each life you are meant to check the exterior environment in order to learn your inner condition.  The outer is a reflection of the inner.

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward.  As this is done, the exterior circumstances should change for the better as the inner self becomes more aware of its own nature and capabilities.  Theoretically, then, in each life you would become stronger, healthier, wealthier, and wiser, but it does not work that way, for many reasons.  As mentioned earlier, many personalities adopt different kinds of experiences, focusing upon development in certain specific areas, and ignoring others perhaps for a series of lives.

No consciousness has the same experiences or interprets them the same, and so each individual utilizes reincarnational opportunities in his own way.  Sex changes, for example, are necessary.  Some individuals alternate their sex in each succeeding life.  Others have a series of female lives and then a series of male lives, or vice versa, but the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences.

Abilities cannot be developed following a one-sex line.  There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood.  When you get to the point that you realize you are forming your day-to-day existence and the life that you know, then you can begin to alter your own mental and psychic patterns, and therefore change your daily environment.

This realization, however, should go hand in hand with a deep intuitional knowledge of the capabilities of the inner self.  These two factors together can release you from any difficulties that have arisen in past lives.  The entire structure of your existence will begin to change with these realizations, and an acceleration of spiritual and psychic growth will develop.

There is an inner logic to your current relationships, attitudes, and experiences.  If in one life, for example, you hated women, you may very well be a woman in the next life.  Only in this way, you see, would you be able to relate to the experience of womanhood, and then as a woman face those attitudes that you yourself had against women in the past.

If you had no sympathy for the sick, you may then be born with a serious disease, again now self-chosen, and find yourself encountering those attitudes that once were your own.  Such an existence would usually also include other issues, however.  No existence is chosen for one reason only, but would also serve many other psychological experiences.

A chronically ill existence, for example, might also be a measure of discipline, enabling you to use deeper abilities that you ignored in a life of good health.  The perfectly happy life for example, on the surface, may appear splendid, but it may also be basically shallow and do little to develop the personality.

The truly happy existence, however, is a deeply satisfying one that would include spontaneous wisdom and spiritual joy.  I am not saying, in other words, that suffering necessarily leads to spiritual fulfillment, nor that all illness is accepted or chosen for such a purpose, for this is not the case.

Illness is often the result of ignorance and lazy mental habits.  Such a discipline may be adopted however by certain personalities who must take strong measures with themselves because of other characteristics.  There is an overall pattern to relationships within lives, and yet this does not mean that you travel through various existences with the same limited and familiar number of friends and acquaintances, merely altered like actors with a change of face or costume.

Groups of individuals come together in various live for certain purposes, separate, and may or may not come together again in a different time or place.  Again, however, there is no rigid rule.  Some families are literally reincarnations of their ancestors, but this is not the general case by any means.  Deep relationships will continue in one way or another.  Others will simply disappear.

The point I want to make is that the opportunity for development and knowledge is as present at this moment, in this life, as it will ever be.  If you ignore day-by-day opportunities for development now, no one can force you to accept and utilize greater abilities after death, or between lives.  The teachers are there in after-death experience, but there are also teachers here in your existence now.

Some families come together in a particular life not because of great attraction or love in a past existence, but for the opposite reason.  Families may be composed, then, of individuals who disliked each other in the past and come together in a close relationship where they are to work together toward a common goal, learn to understand each other better, and work out problems in a different kind of context.

Jointly, each generation has its own purpose.  It is this – to perfect inner knowledge, and to materialize it as faithfully as possible outward into the world.  The changing physical scene throughout the centuries, as you know them, represents the inner images that have flickered through the minds of the individuals who lived within the world through the various ages.

It is not necessary that you learn about your own past lives, though it may be helpful if you understand that you chose the circumstances of your birth this time.

If you examine your own life now carefully, the challenges that you have set for yourself will become apparent.  This is not easy to do, but it is within the grasp of each individual.  If you release yourself from hatred, then you automatically release yourself from any such relationships in the future – or any experiences that are based upon hatred.

Knowing your reincarnational background, but not knowing the true nature of your present self, is useless.  You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, “This is because of something I did in a past life”, for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences.  You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.

You cannot say, “The poor are poor simply because they chose poverty, and therefore there is no need for me to help them”.  This attitude can easily draw poverty to you in the next experience.

Each individual is not at the same level of achievement even at the end of the reincarnational cycle.  Some possess certain qualities that do not find a counterpart within human experience.  Physical existence itself has a different effect upon various individuals.  Some find it an excellent medium of expression and development.  They are suited to it.  They have the knack for expressing themselves in physical ways and objectifying inner feelings faithfully.  Others find this difficult, and yet these same individuals may do much better in other levels of reality.

There are “hardy souls” who thrive in physical reality, and who may have difficulties acclimating to other nonphysical areas of activity.  In all of these areas, however, deep spiritual or emotional contexts are never negated.  Very close friends from past lives, who are in a position to do so, often communicate with you when you are in the dream state, and the relationships are continued though you do not realize it consciously.

On an unconscious basis, you are aware of the birth into physical life of someone you have known in the past.  The strangers that you meet in your dreams are often, of course, people now alive – contemporaries – that you have also known in past lives.

There are also passing relationships, contacts made and then dropped.  A mate from any given life, for example, may or may not represent someone with whom you have a deep abiding tie, and again you may marry someone because of highly ambiguous feelings from a past life, and choose a married relationship that is not based upon love, though love may emerge.

Twins, incidentally, almost always involve very deep, abiding psychic relationships of a strong, sometimes obsessive nature.  I am speaking now of identical twins.

Reincarnational goals also vary greatly.  I want to stress that reincarnation is a tool used by personalities.  They each use it in their own way.  Some enjoy female existences, or have greater fondness for male lives.  While both must be encountered, there is a great range of choice and activity.  Some personalities will have difficulties along certain lines, and develop with relative ease in other ways.

Predetermination is never involved, for the challenge and circumstances are chosen.  Some problems may be put off, for example, for several existences.  Some personalities want to solve their strongest problems and get them over with, perhaps in a series of rather trying existences and exaggerated circumstances.

Others of a more placid nature will take their problems one at a time.  Rest periods may also be taken, and they are highly therapeutic.  For example, an excellent, satisfying life with a minimum of problems may be chosen either as a prelude to a life of concentrated challenge or as a self-adopted reward for a previous difficult life.  Those that thoroughly enjoy the physical medium, without being obsessed by it, however, do very well indeed.  The “laws” of reincarnation are adapted by the individual personalities to suit themselves.

Reincarnational Relationships

Seth Speaks, Session 550

Reincarnational Relationships

Throughout your reincarnational existences you expand your consciousness, your ideas, your perceptions, your values.  You break away from self-adopted restrictions, and you grow spiritually as you learn to step aside from limiting conceptions and dogmas.

Your rate of learning depends entirely upon you, however.  Limited, dogmatic, or rigid concepts of good and evil can hold you back.  Too narrow ideas of the nature of existence can follow you through several lives if you do not choose to be spiritually and psychically flexible.

These rigid ideas can indeed act as leashes, so that you are forced to circle like a tied puppy dog about a very small radius.  In such cases, through perhaps a group of existences, you will find yourself battling against ideas of good and evil, running about in a circle of confusion, doubt, and anxiety.

Your friends and acquaintances will be concerned with the same problems, for you will draw to yourself those with the same concerns.  I am telling you again, therefore, that many of your ideas of good and evil are highly distortive, and shadow all understanding you have of the nature of reality.

If you form a guilt in your mind, then it is a reality for you, and you must work it out.  But many of your form guilts for which there is no adequate cause, and you saddle yourselves with these guilts without reason.  In your dimension of activity there appear to be a wild assortment of evils.  Let me tell you that he who hates an evil merely creates another one.

From within your point of reference it is often difficult for you to perceive that all events work toward creativity, or to trust in the spontaneous creativity of your own natures.  Within your system, to kill is obviously a moral crime, but to kill another in punishment only compounds the original error.  Someone very well known who established a church – if you will, a civilization – once said, “Turn the other cheek if you are attacked”.  The original meaning of that remark, however, should be understood.  You should turn the other cheek because you realize that basically the attacker only attacks himself.

Then you are free, and the reaction is a good one.  If you turn the other cheek without this understanding, however, and feel resentful, or if you turn the other cheek out of a feeling of pseudomoral superiority, then the reaction is far from adequate.

Now all of this can be applied to your relationships in your reincarnational existences, and of course it also is highly pertinent to your current daily experience.  If you hate another person, that hate may bind you to him through as many lives as you allow the hate to consume you.  You draw to yourself in this existence and in all others those qualities upon which you concentrate your attention.  If you vividly concern yourself with the injustices you feel have been done you, then you attract more such experience, and if this goes on, then it will be mirrored in your next existence.  It is true that in between lives there is “time” for understanding and contemplation.

Those who do not take advantage of such opportunities in this life often do not do so when it is over.  Consciousness will expand.  It will create.  It will turn itself inside out to do so.  There is nothing outside yourself that will force you to understand these issues or face them.

It is useless then to say, “When this life is over I will look back upon my experience and mend my ways”.  This is like a young man saying, “When I grow old and retire, I will use all those abilities that I am not now developing”.  You are setting the stage for your “next” life now.  The thoughts you think today will in one way or another become the fabric of your next existence.  There are no magic words that will make you wise, that will fill you with understanding and compassion, that will expand your consciousness.

Your thoughts and everyday experience contain the answers.  Any successes in this life, any abilities, have been worked out through past experience.  They are yours by right.  You worked to develop them.  If you look about you at your relatives, friends, acquaintances, and business associates, you will also see what kind of a person you are, for you are drawn to them as they are drawn to you, through very basic inner similarities.

If you examine your thoughts for five minutes at various times during the day for several times a month, you will indeed receive a correct impression of the kind of life you have so far arranged for yourself in the next existence.  If you are not pleased with what you discover, then you had better begin changing the nature of your thoughts and feelings.

As you will see later in this book, you can do so.  There is no rule saying that in each life you must meet again those whom you have known before; and yet through the nature of attraction, that is often the case.

You may be born into your present family for many reasons.  You may find after death a much stronger relationship emotionally with a personality from a past life.  If you are married, for example, and have no true rapport with your mate, you may instead find a past wife or husband waiting for you.

Oftentimes members of various groups – military groups, church groups, hunting groups, will in another life form family relationships in which they will then work out old problems in new ways.  Families must be considered as gestalts of psychic activity; they have a subjective identity, of which no particular member of the group may be aware.

Families have subconscious purposes, though the individual members of the family may pursue these goals without conscious awareness.  Such groups are set up ahead of time, so to speak, in between physical existences.  Oftentimes four or five individuals will set themselves a given challenge, and assign to the various members different parts to play.  Then in a physical existence the roles will be worked out.

The inner self is always aware of the hidden mechanisms of these family gestalts.  Those who have been closely bound through emotional ties often prefer to remain in closely tied or loosely tied physical relationships that continue through many lifetimes.  New relationships are always encouraged however, for you can have ingrown reincarnational “families”.  Many of these form physical organizations that are actually manifestations of inner groupings.

I spoke earlier of rigid concepts of right and wrong.  There is only one way to avoid this problem.  Only true compassion and love will lead to an understanding of the nature of good, and only these qualities will serve to annihilate the erroneous and distortive concepts of evil.

The simple fact is that as long as you believe in the concept of evil, it is a reality in your system, and you will always find it manifested.  Your belief in it will, therefore, seem highly justified.  If you carry this concept through succeeding generations, through reincarnations, then you add to its reality.

Let me try to throw some light upon what I am trying to tell you.  First of all, love always involves freedom.  If a man says he loves you and yet denies you your freedom, then you often hate him.  Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion.  This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglements through various lives.

If you hate evil, then beware of your conception of the word.  Hate is restrictive.  It narrows down your perception.  It is indeed a dark glass that shadows all of your experience.  You will find more and more to hate, and bring the hated elements into your own experience.

If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender.  In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.

If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you.

If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn in this life and in others toward those qualities; again, because they are those upon which you concentrate.  A generation that hates war will not bring peace.  A generation that loves peace will bring peace.

To die with hatred for any cause or people, or for any reason, is a great disadvantage.  You have all kinds of opportunities now to recreate your personal experience in more beneficial ways, and to change your world.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours.  If you insist upon harboring hatreds within you now, you are very likely to continue doing so.  On the other had, those sparks of truth, intuition, love, joy, creativity, and accomplishment gained now, will work for you then as they do now.

They are, you see, the only true realities.  They are the only real foundations of existence.  It is foolish, as Ruburt once said, to hate a storm or shake your fists at it and call it names.  You laugh if you think of children or natives in such activities.  It is useless to personify a storm and treat it as a demon, focusing upon its destructive elements, or those elements that to you appear destructive.

Change of form is not destructive.  The explosive energy of a storm is highly creative.  Consciousness is not annihilated.  A storm is part of creativity.  You view it from your own perspective, and yet one individual will feel within the storm the unending cycle of creativity, and another will personify it as the work of the devil.

Through all your lives you will interpret the reality that you see in your own way, and that way will have its effect upon you, and in turn upon others.  The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion: He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.

Now I am emphasizing the issue of hate in this chapter on reincarnation because its results can be so disastrous.  A man who hates always believes himself justified.  He never hates anything that he believes to be good.  He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.

I would like to make it clear that there is nothing to be gained, either, by hating hatred.  You fall into the same trap.

What is needed is a basic trust in the nature of vitality, and faith that all elements of experience are used for a greater good, whether or not you can perceive the way in which “evil” is transmuted into creativity.  What you love will also be a part of your experience in this life and others.

The most important idea to be remembered is that no one thrusts the experience of any given lifetime upon you.  It is formed faithfully according to your own emotions and beliefs.  The great power and energy of love and creativity is apparent in the mere fact of your existence.  This is the truth so often forgotten – that the combination of consciousness and existence continues and absorbs those elements that seem to you so destructive.

Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet though you hate life, you will continue to exist.  You have made appointments, each of you, that you have forgotten.  They were signed, so to speak, before you were born in this existence.  In many cases the friends that you make were close to you long before you met them in this present life.

This does not mean that every one in your present acquaintanceship has been known to you, and it certainly does not imply a boring record player over and over again, for each encounter is a new one in its own way.  Remembering what I said about families, realize also that towns and villages may also be composed of the past inhabitants of other such towns and villages, transposed with new experiences and backgrounds, as the group tries different experiments.

Now sometimes, there are also such variations in that the inhabitants of a particular town now may be the reborn inhabitants of those who lived, say, in 1632 in a small Irish village.  They may be transposed to a town in Idaho.

Some who wanted to travel from the Old World to the New, may be reborn in the new one.  You must remember also that abilities from past lives are at your disposal for your present use.  You reap your own rewards.  Information concerning these is often given to you in the sleep state, and there is a kind of gestalt type of dream, a root dream, by which those who have known each other in past lives now communicate.

In such dreams, general mass-information is given, that the individuals then use as they desire.  Overall plans for development are made, as the group members, say, of a town decide upon its destiny.  Some individuals always choose to be born as a part of some group – reborn, in other words, with past contemporaries, while others, disdaining such endeavors, return in much more isolated positions.

This is a matter of psychological feeling.  Some individuals are more at ease, more assured, and more capable working with others in this case.  You could consider an analogy in which John Doe follows his kindergarten class all the way through high school.  In a reincarnational situation, he would always choose to return with associates.  Others, however, would rather skip from school to school, appearing alone, relatively speaking, with greater freedom, more challenge, but without the comforting framework of security chosen by others.

In each case the individual is the judge, not only of each succeeding life, its time, environment, and historical date, but also of its overall character and methods of accomplishment.  There are as many different ways to reincarnate, therefore, as there are inner selves, and each inner self will choose its own characteristic methods.

Aside:  Humanity And Overpopulation Of Earth

(A spirited conversation sprang up now between the four of us.  Sue brought up the question of overpopulation.  How can this be, she wondered:  If a certain number of entities were responsible for the creation of our physical world, where do the extra human beings come from?  I told her that, according to Seth, each personality making up an entity could manifest itself physically as often as it chose to.  Seth then interrupted.)

Now:  Give me a moment here.  First of all, as a species, in the context of normal usage, you have considered yourselves as apart from the rest of nature and consciousness.

Your own survival as a species was your main concern.  You considered other species only in the light of their use to you.  You did not have any true conception of the sacredness of all consciousness, nor of your relationship within it.  You were losing your grasp of that great truth.

In the present circumstances you are carrying that idea forward – of species survival regardless of the consequences, the idea of changing the environment to suit your own purposes; and this has led you to a disregard of spiritual truths.

In physical reality, therefore, you are seeing the results.  Now those personalities who are returning are doing so for various reasons.  Some of them are drawn to physical life again because of these attitudes.  They are those who in the past, in your terms, strove for physical existence without consideration for the rights of other species.  They are driven to return because of their own desires.

The species must learn the value of the individual man.  The species is also learning its dependence upon other species, and beginning to comprehend its part in the whole framework in physical reality.

Now:  Some individuals are being reborn at this time simply to help you understand.  They are forcing the issue, and forcing the crisis, for you still have time to change your ways.  You are working on two main problems, but both involve the sacredness of the individual, and the individual’s relationship with others and with all physically oriented consciousness.

The problem of war will sooner or later teach you that when you kill another man, basically you will end up killing yourself.  The overpopulation problem will teach you that if you do not have a loving concern for the environment in which you dwell, it will no longer sustain you – you will not be worthy of it.  You will not be destroying the planet, you see.  You will not be destroying the birds or the flowers, or the grain or the animals.  You will not be worthy of them, and they will be destroying you.

You have set up the problem for yourselves within the framework of your reference.  You will not understand your part within the framework of nature until you actually see yourselves in danger of tearing it apart.  You will not destroy consciousness.  You will not annihilate the consciousness of even one leaf, but in your context, if the problem were not solved, these would fade from your experience.

The crisis is a kind of therapy, however.  It is a teaching method that you have set up for yourselves because you need it.  And you need it now, before your species embarks upon journeys to other physical realities.  You must learn your lessons now in your own backyard before you travel to other worlds.  So you have brought this upon yourself for that purpose and you will learn.