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.