“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are not any of those past selves, even though they are a part of the history of your being. They are themselves in their own space and time. They exist simultaneously with your own life, even as the strata of rock exist simultaneously with the mountain.

Like the mountain, therefore, you have a history in terms of the present that is yours, and yet not yours. It does not control you, for you alter it with each thought and action, even as each motion at the mountain’s top affects its base. The layers at the bottom, however, are also constantly changing, so that the whole area is a gestalt of relatedness.

(Most emphatically:) In terms of time only, there is an archaeological meaning that is hidden within your own nature. To discover it you look “down” through the levels of your own being, there to find the layers of selfhood that in your world represent the past history of yourself, from which you emerged. You are not those selves psychically, however, any more than you are your mother’s or your father’s in physical terms. You are as different from those reincarnational selves, therefore, as you are from your parents, though you share certain backgrounds and characteristics.

The knowledge of probabilities⁴ brings forth present time and reality. Voices speak through the genes and chromosomes that connect the future and the past in a balance that you call the present form. The history of the private psyche and the mass experience of the species, again, resides in each individual. The archaeology of the past and the future alike is alive within the layers of consciousness that compose your being.

Now … Give us a moment … In many ways your language⁵ itself has a history that you do not understand.

The past is obviously built into words in terms of time. When you speak a given word you may not know the history of its changes through the years, yet you speak it perfectly. You seldom realize that the present state of your language, whatever it is, will for others someday seem to be an archaic version. In whatever terms, again, you think of yourselves as being at the top of the mountain. In your terms, language presupposes a particular kind of development of mind, and when you think of language you tie the two together.

A simple tree deals with the nature of probabilities as it thrusts forward into new seeds. Computations go on constantly within it, and that communication involves an inner kind of language innocent of symbols and vowels. The tree knows its present and future history,⁷ in your terms, but it understands a future that is not preordained. It feels its own power in the present as it constructs that future. In deeper terms the tree’s seeds also realize that there is a future there — a variety of futures toward which they grope.