A Wonderful Practice from "Anna, Voice of the Magdalenes"

Extract from Anna, Voice of the Magdalenes

He has been practicing the powerful connection between conscious breathing and mindfulness of the present moment.  He is looking deeply into his mind; his stream of thoughts and feelings and how there is no difference between his mind and how he experiences his outer world – how it is all a dream and he is the dreamer of the dream.  He is consciously entering his sleeping dreams and his daytime dream as a more awake and compassionate witness; a conscious human being capable of changing his dream of life to be more joyful, thus assisting the collective dream to be more harmonious and happy.

Though somewhat challenging, he is already developing a keen awareness that everything that appears to be solid is actually without substance and cannot be independently separate from the web of Oneness.  Everything is energy vibrating – coalescing and dissolving according to how he is focusing and aligning his consciousness – either expressing its infinite potential as harmony, wholeness and balance or as myriad kinds of suffering.  He knows to ask himself, “Am I resting my awareness in the essential emptiness out of which the All rises, while retaining an awareness of pure, fresh Beingness – an abiding sense of peace and freedom – or am I yielding to my old, conditioned mind’s grasping to make my transitory experiences real and permanent?”  Either way is all right, but the choice of loving-kindness and calm abiding in the present moment feel better.  One choice brings harm and isolation, the other nurtures the heart of life rather than creating an arid wasteland.  In these ways, I am assisting him to take what he already knows intuitively to deeper levels of awareness.

In the days we have been together he is becoming more aware of his energy bodies, which has grandly assisted his healing process.  It won’t be long before he’ll actually be able to travel beyond the confines of his physical body.

Extract from Session 735

Extract From Session 735 of Seth's "Unknown" Reality, vol 2

… To some extent you can actualize portions of your own unknown reality, and draw them into the experienced area of your life.  There is an obvious relationship between one note and another in a musical composition.  Now in terms of physical families and in larger terms countries, there is a relationship between realities, which constantly change as the notes do.  To some extent your reality is picked up by your contemporaries.  They accept it or not according to the particular theme or focus of their lives.

In those terms, you are not a part of any reality that is not your own.  If you share it with others, it is because others are concerned with variations of the same theme.  This applies in terms of world goals “at any given time”.

For example: In certain terms, you are working with the challenge of how best to use the world’s resources.  Some countries will overproduce.  Others will underproduce.  Contradictions seem to occur.  Some people will be overfed while others starve; some sated with material conveniences, others relatively ignorant of them.  These are variations of the same theme, you see.  In overall terms contemporaries are working on the same group challenges, though either oversupply or great lack might show itself at any particular place.  Perhaps, however, the challenges could not be clearly delineated without those extravagances of degree.

As contemporaries, counterparts choose a particular time framework.  The time format alone makes certain focuses clear, that in your terms could not be made in another context.  What you learn in your present about industry – “progress” – and the equitable sharing of earth’s products, could only be learned in a context in which industrialism was experienced as going too far, where technology was seen and known as a growing jeopardy.

In terms that I admit are difficult to describe, the creative solutions will change the course of history in the past, so that variations are taken, and technology does not progress in the same way that it “has” in your experience.

I have said before that personally you can change the past from the present.  The same applies to civilizations.

Seth "Unknown" Reality Vol 2 Session 733

 

When you are in an airplane looking down upon the planet, then you see the mountain ranges and the valleys, the rivers, plateaus, cities, fields and villages.  To some extent you realize that the world has physical contents, existing at one time yet varying in their characteristics.  In those terms, the world is composed of its physical ingredients.  That “package” is the only part of the picture that you see, however.

Psychically, your world is composed of the contents of its consciousness.  You have maps of continents and oceans, and in the entire view of each portion is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, all fitting together perfectly, smoothly flowing into the natural structure of the world.  So at any given time there is a world consciousness, a perfect jigsaw of awareness in which each identity, however large or small, has its part.

There are earthquakes that erupt physically, and tracings are made of them.  There are also inner earthquakes of consciousness from which the physical ones emerge – storms of mind or being, eruptions in which one segment of the world consciousness, repressed in one area, explodes in another.

If you could orbit your planet in a different kind of craft, you could view the psychic contents of the world, seeing the world consciousness shining far more brilliantly than any lighted city.  You could spot the point of intense activity, see the birth of new myths and the death of old ones as certainly as you might be able to see a mountain slide or a tidal wave.  The physical portions of earth are all related.  So does consciousness form its own kind of inner structures from which, again, the physical ones emerge.  You are indeed counterparts, then, each of the other.  Yet as there is great variety to physical form, so counterparts follow a still more expansive inner freedom that finds an even greater diversity of characteristics.

As I have certainly hinted, the body is a miraculous organism, and you have barely learned the most simple of its structures.  You do not understand the properties of soul or body, yet the body was given to you so that you could learn from it.  The properties of the earth are meant to lead you into the nature of the soul.  You create physical reality, yet without knowing how you do so, so that the wondrous structure of the earth itself is meant to lead you to question your own source.  Nature as you understand it is meant to be your teacher.  You are not its master.

The creator is not the master of his creations.  He is simply their creator, and he creates because he does not attempt to control.  Period.

When you try to control power or people, you always copy.  To some extent the world copies itself, in that there are patterns.  But those patterns are always changed to one extent or another, so that no object is ever a copy of another – though it may appear to be the same.

In your terms, the world is intensely different from one moment to another, with each smallest portion of consciousness choosing its reality from a field of infinite probabilities.  Immense calculations, far beyond your conscious decisions as you think of them, are possible only because of the unutterable freedom that resides within minute worlds inside your skull – patterns of interrelationships, counterparts so cunningly woven that each is unique, freewheeling, and involved in an infinite cooperative venture so powerful that the atoms stay in certain forms, and the same stars shine in the sky.

The familiar and strange are intimately connected in your most obvious, your simplest utterance.  You are surrounded by miracles.  Why, then, does the world so often seem dour and cruel?  Why do your fellow beings sometimes seem like unfeeling monsters – Frankensteins not of body but of mind, spiritual idiots, ignorant of any heritage of love or truth or even graceful beasthood?  Why does it seem to many of you that the race, the species is doomed?  Why do some of you feel in your quiet moments, such a sentence just?

You make your own reality.

Generally speaking, most of you live in your own world, with others of your kind.  Those of you who do not believe in war have not experienced it.  It may have surrounded you, but you did not experience it.  Those of you who do not believe in greed have not suffered its “consequences”.  If you still see it, it is because it is a part of your reality.  If you are honestly not greedy, yet you see greed, then perhaps you are serving as an example to others – but you form your own reality.

There are more worlds than you suppose, and in your own private experience each of you contributes to the world that you know.  You and your counterparts together form it.  Your physical body alone is equipped to perceive far more than you presently allow it to.  Physically you are a part of every other person upon the earth, and you have a connection with each leaf and frog and nail.

You choose the city or state or country in which you live.  No one forces you to stay there unless you are looking for an excuse to remain.  So you choose your psychic land as well.  You can travel from one psychic land to another as you can journey into other parts of the physical world.  Some great travelers never left the country of their birth.

Michelangelo roamed the centuries, picking up visions and ideas as others might buy postcards, journeying from one country to a foreign land.  His genius shows you what you are, and yet it is but a hint of the potential with which your species is endowed.

In the light of such ideals, surely you seem wanting – yet your reality is one in which the greatest freedoms have been allowed.  This means that you have given yourselves full range so that all probabilities could be explored, and none left out that were physically feasible.

This species gave itself no “preordained” taboos.

The infinite ranges possible to human capabilities would be explored – and those who chose the route said, quote: “We will trust that our creativity will find its own way, and if there are nightmares we will waken from them.  We will even learn from them.  We will dare to push aside the dimensions of being into those realms in which only the gods have gone before – and through our utter vulnerability to experience, discover the divinity that gives our humanity its meaning.  And through the compassion that we have learned, will we be able to understand the divine errors that gave us the gift of our birth.  Souls and molecules each are learning, each are forming realities, each are a part of a divinity in which each counterpart has a part to play.”

I dwell, in a way, in a realm that is more direct than yours.  That is one image.  I allow myself greater acknowledgement of my being.  I speak with the wisdom, for example, that your cells would utter if they had speech.

I am more aware of my reality than you are of yours, but the terms of being are the same in every place and every time.  They bring forth the greater comprehension of each self, of itself.  Ruburt experiences now what he calls a massive quality, a physical and psychic expansion of consciousness in which the dear familiar world seems small – yet twice precious.  So does it appear to my consciousness.

The petty wars, even those still to be fought, are but dim memories, once vital but lost as nightmares in greater awakenings.  So even in this moment Ruburt faintly feels a nostalgic memory for lives come and gone, as you might for fond dreams barely recalled.

They represent a present unique beyond telling, alive in each consciousness, more important than you recognize.  There are no real rules to be followed that will bring you into such an encounter with the present moment of reality – only a trust in the nature of your being.  And that trust is within you whether or not you recognize it, for it gives you your present experience; and no matter how your mind questions, it rides securely in the great creativity of the soul.

That soul constantly creates the body, and each individual on the face of the earth at any given time places his or her trust in that reality.  That feeling of certainty is the same that any plant knows.  Any idea, creative insight, or dream, rides upon the same sure thrust.

Seth on DNA and a Plan Analogy

Seth "Unknown" Reality, Volume 2 Session 731

Your present idea of identity is maintained only because you grant as valid such small aspects of your own reality.

In other words, your accepted concepts of selfhood would disappear if you ever allowed any significant subjective experience to intrude.  “The Absent Self” – the absent or unknown self – is the portion of your own existence that you do not ordinarily perceive or accept, though there is within you a longing for it.

Much of “Unknown” Reality is involved with the breaking up of theories that have been long accepted, but that prevent you from perceiving the powerful nature of those absent portions of the self.  As you focus upon certain details from a larger field of physical reality, so then you focus upon only the small portion of yourself that you consider “real”.

You carry within you, however, the deep knowledge of experience that in your terms would be prior, yet in your cells and your own deeper mind such information is current.

Selfhood overspills with great luxurious outcroppings, yet you jealously guard against such creativity.  To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes, which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible – one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before.  As Ruburt recently suspected, some very old cultures have been aware of this.  While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods.  This does not meant that the individual self was less, but was more aware of its own reality.  A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before – while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

The animals were also accepted in this natural philosophy of selfhood as the individual plainly saw the living quality of consciousness.  The characteristics of the animals were understood to continue “life”, adding their qualities to the experience of the self in a new way.

The human body would be used in earth’s great husbandry as, from it, dying and decaying new forms would arise.  This was a give-and-take in which, for instance, a jungle neighborhood was truly home, and all was a portion of the self psychically, spiritually, and physically.

Let those who will, laugh at tales of spirits turning into the trees – a simplistic theory, certainly, yet a symbolic statement in such societies: The dead were buried at home in the same close territory, to form in later times the very composition of the ground upon which religions grew.  Again, your limited concepts of selfhood make what I am saying difficult for you to perceive.

I am not saying, for example, that the living consciousness of each individual returned to the earth literally, but that the physical material permeated and stampede with that consciousness did, and does.  Again, even the cells retain knowledge of all of their affiliations.  In physical terms the consciousness that you understand is based upon this.

Selfhood is poorer when it does not at least intuitively understand this heritage.

Those intimate realizations, however, had to be counterbalanced in line with certain purposes set by your species, and even for that matter momentarily set aside so that other abilities and characteristics could emerge.  The species’ sense of curiosity would not allow it to stay in any home territory for long, and so the sense of intimacy was purposely broken.  It would become highly important again, however, when the planet was populated extensively, as it is now – only the original feeling of home area has to be extended over the face of the earth.  The “absent” portions of the self are ready to emerge.  The other, to you probable, lines of consciousness can now come into play.

These different lines of focus will each show you other aspects of your own reality, as individuals and as a species.

I said once that no knowledge exists outside of consciousness.

In those terms, neutral data are not transferred through the chromosomes.  Consciousness passes on information through “living” vehicles.  Whether physically materialized or not, knowledge is possessed by consciousness.  It is always “individualized”, though not necessarily in your terms.

The information carried by the chromosomes is not general, but highly specific.  It is codified data (itself alive) that contains within it the essence of ancestral experience – of specific ancestral experience.  Biologically you do indeed carry within you, then, the memories of your particular ancestors.  These form a partial basis for your subjective and physical existence, and provide the needed support for it.

Since one portion of your heritage is physical, in those terms, those memories can be translated again, back into emotional and psychological events, though usually they are not in your societies.

To that extent the so-called past experience of your ancestors and of your species is concurrent with your own, biologically speaking.  That is but one line, however, covered by the chromosomes.  You have “another line” of existence that also serves as a support for the one that you presently recognize.  It includes other interweaving physical relationships that bind you with all others upon your planet at the same adjacent level of time.  That is, to some extent or another you are related to all of those alive upon the planet.  You are time contemporaries.  You will have a far closer relationship with some than with others.  Some will be your counterparts.

These may or may not be closer to you than family relationships, but psychically speaking they will share a certain kind of history with you.  You will also be connected through the physical framework of the earth in the large give-and-take of its space-time scheme.

A third line supporting your selfhood as you think of it is the reincarnational one.  This is somewhat like the ancestral line and there are also reflections in the genes and chromosomes undetected by your scientists.  The ancestral and reincarnational lines merge to some extent to form what you think of as your genetic patterns ahead of time, so to speak.  Before this life you chose what you wished from those two main areas.

Reincarnational experience is also transmitted, then, and can be retranslated from a biological code-imprint into emotional awareness.  Again, however, as you are not your parents or your ancestors, you are not your “reincarnational selves”.

Here also ideas of time hamper you, for I must explain all of this in temporal terms.  Since time is simultaneous, at other levels your ancestors knew of your birth though they died centuries ago in recognized continuity.  The same applies to reincarnational existences that you think of as occurring in the past.

You cannot say that your ancestors, like some strange plants, were growing toward what you are, or that you are the sum of their experiences.  They were, they are, themselves.  You cannot say that you are the sum of your past reincarnational lives either, and for the same reasons.  You cut off the knowledge of yourself, and so divisions seem to occur.  You are somewhat like a plant that recognizes only one of its leaves at a time.  A leaf feels its deeper reality as a part of the plant, and adds to its own sense of continuity, and even to its own sense of individuality.  But you often pretend that you are some old dangling leaf, with no roots, growing without a plant to support you.

All of the leaves now growing on this plant could be thought of as counterparts of each other, each alive and individual in one time, each contributing yet facing in different directions.  As one leaf falls another takes its place, until next year the whole plant, still living, will have a completely new set of leaves – future reincarnational selves of this batch.

You are not plants, but the analogy is a simple one.  And if you will forgive me – overall it holds water.

There is a constant interaction in the plant, between its parts, that you do not perceive.  The leaves now present are biologically valid, interrelating in your terms.  Yet in time terms each leaf is also aware of the past history of the plant, and biologically they spring up from that “past”. 

Each leaf seeks to express its leafhood as fully as possible.  Leaves take in sun, which helps the plant itself to grow.  The development of the leaves, then, is very important to the plant’s own existence.  The cells of the plant are kept in contact with the environment through the leaves’ experiences, and future probabilities are always taken into consideration.  The smallest calculations involving light and dark are known.  The life of the plant and its leaves cannot be separated.

The plant has its own “idea” of itself, in which each of its leaves has its part.  Yet each leaf has the latent capacities of the whole plant.  Root one, for instance, and a new plant will grow.

Selves have far greater freedom than leaves, but they can also root themselves if they choose – and they do.  Reincarnational selves are like leaves that have left the plant, choosing a new medium of existence.  In this analogy, the dropped leaves of the physical plant have fulfilled their own purposes to themselves as leaves, and to the plant.  These selves, however, dropping from one branch of time, root themselves in another time and become new selves from which others will sprout.

The larger self, then, seeds itself in time.  In this process no identity is lost and no identity is the same, yet all are interrelated.  So you can theoretically expand your consciousness to include the knowledge of your past lives, though these lives were yours and not yours.  They have a common root, as next year’s leaves have a common root with the leaves now of this plant.

Such knowledge, however, would automatically affect those past lives.  Ideas automatically affect those past lives.  Ideas of cause and effect can hold you back here, because it seems to you that the leaves of next year come as an effect cause by this year’s leaves.  To the plant and its innate creative pattern, however, all of its manifestations are one – an expression of itself, each portion different.  The knowledge of its “future” leaves, as potential pattern, exists now.  The same applies to the psyche.  In that greater realm of reality there is creative interplay, and interrelationships between all aspects of selfhood.

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.